US Carbon Management Project Review Meeting 2024 – Overview

The annual US DOE Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETLL) Carbon Management Project Review Meeting was held from the 5^th to the 9^th of August in Pittsburgh. The attendance was the largest ever, at around 1,400. All DOE funded research projects have to present, so as well as plenary sessions they had six parallel sessions to cover some 400 projects. Half were on storage and transport, and the other half covered point source capture, removals, and conversion.

Note the high number of CarbonSAFE projects, both phase II and III, that provided storage assessments and enabled and de-risked large-scale storage sites, including Class VI permitting. Also striking was the number of removals projects. The DAC projects, including DAC hub developments, were anticipated, but in addition there were a significant number of marine removal projects. These covered both the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere using marine techniques, but also removal of CO₂ from the ocean itself (for storage elsewhere). We think that the US is world-leading in this area.

Of significance and noteworthy were that in most presentations the community benefit plans were shared. It is a DOE requirement that every project has these, and these will make a real difference in engagement around the projects and enabling education on CCS and future workforce development.

During the conference two announcements were made by DOE. They announced awards of $44m to nine RITAP projects. These are technical assistance projects on storage at the basin scale, congratulations to the nine recipients (see Project Selections for FOA 3014: Regional Initiative for Technical Assistance Partnerships (RITAP) to Advance Deployment of Basin-Scale Carbon Transport and Storage and Community Engagement | Department of Energy). Also, there was the launch of the Commercial Direct Air Capture Pilot Prize, with up to $52m available to develop and test at pilot scale DAC technologies (see DAC Pilot Prize | HeroX ).

The plenaries that started each day had great updates of significance. On the first day, Sally Benson took us on a trip through time, summarising that for CCS decades the 1990s were the decade of pioneers, the 2000s of foundations, the 2010s of early deployment, the 2020s of confidence building, the 2030s of global scale-up, the 2050s of massive deployment.

I was invited onto the second-day plenary panel, to give an update on transboundary developments, with Bilha Ndirangu of Great Carbon Valley talking about DAC in Kenya, Benn Wheeler of LETA talking about CCS developments in Australia, Greg Ronczka of Heidelberg talking about their 14 cement CCS projects, and moderated by Phil Bainbridge of GCCSI. The second day also had a plenary panel on community engagement and workforce development, with great talks by Bryan Kent Wallace, Sue Hovorka, Peter Romine, Vernon Travis, and was moderated by April Augustine.

The third day plenary panel covered the Regulatory Landscape. This had presentations by Zachary Schafer of EPA, Tristan Brown of the Department of Transport (DoT), Jim Kendall of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), and Rebecca Higgins of the Permitting Council. We learnt that the EPA currently has 141 Class VI applications in, from 48 projects. We heard that the DoT had assessed the CO₂ pipeline failure in Mississippi in 2020 and produced a 300 page report on this, including how existing regulations were not followed, and has strengthened the regulations accordingly. As we know, BOEM is developing the regulation for offshore storage in federal waters, and this will be out at the end of this year.

A plenary session was devoted to Land Considerations. This included Simone Stewart from the National Wildlife Federation, who spoke of the need for environmental (including wildlife) baselines for projects, and their online carbon management mapping decision support tool to cover wildlife concerns. Also in this session was Steve Grey, of the Navajo Nation, with interesting perspectives on their exploitation of energy resources but water scarcity in communities.

The DOE’s investment in offshore and Gulf of Mexico projects took a day of sessions. The Gulf of Mexico has a lot of potential, onshore and offshore, and several project developers are actively developing projects here, some supported by CarbonSAFE funding.

Also worthy of noting in the margins was the first time that any CCS conference has had a “Run Club”. This was organised by Sarah Forbes and Gilly Rosen and was even included in the conference agenda. This was well attended, with up to 30 runners each day, and feedback was that it was an excellent integrator for those at the conference for the first time and also for mixing across CCS disciplines.

Overall, a wealth of information was shared from some $2.4bn worth of US projects across the CCS spectrum. Many thanks to the US DOE FECM and NETL and all involved.

A more detailed blog on the capture and energy system aspects of the Carbon Management Project Review Meeting will follow from IEAGHG’s Abdul’Aziz Aliyu.