DOE earmarks $70M for new carbon storage, transportation programs

Dive Brief:

The Department of Energy has announced $70 million in funding for new transportation and carbon storage research, including 26 projects across two innovative power programs.
DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) will fund one program to develop technologies for converting water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide into energy-dense carbon-neutral liquid fuels.
The other program will examine the issue of "carbon debt" in farm soils, developing techniques to improve how much carbon is stored in crop soil and at what depths.

Dive Insight:

DOE's announcements this week are a mouthful of technical acronyms, but they showcase the range and innovation that its ARPA-E agency is going after.

Both programs will be funded equally, each receiving $35 million for a range of projects. The Renewable Energy to Fuels Through Utilization of Energy-Dense Liquids (REFUEL) looks to create energy-dense carbon-neutral liquid fuels (CNLFs), and back into electricity or hydrogen fuel on demand. DOE said the program will provide funding to 16 projects to "accelerate the shift to domestically produced transportation fuels," while enabling enable greater integration of renewable energy sources onto the grid.

DOE's Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration (ROOTS) program will fund research into developing tools that will assist farmers in choosing crop varieties that better capture carbon molecules from the atmosphere and store them in their root systems.

“ARPA-E invests in programs that draw on a broad set of disciplines and require the bold thinking we need to build a better energy future,” ARPA-E Director Ellen Williams said in a statement. “REFUEL’s way of creating fuels from commonly available molecules could drastically change how we power our cars and trucks, while ROOTS projects will help us find crops that trap carbon into the soil and reduce the need for costly, emissions-heavy fertilizers.”

ARPA-E continues to roll out funding for non-traditional technologies. Over the summer, it announced it would offer funding for efficiency projects that could ultimately lower power demand by 1% annually, through $25 million in funding for concepts focused on creating "innovative components to increase the energy efficiency of datacenters."

All total, 26 projects will be funded by the agency's latest announcement: 16 by the REFUEL program and 10 by ROOTS.

In the REFUEL program, for example, New York-based Bettergy Corp. will receive more than $1.5 million to develop a system to “crack,” or break apart, ammonia, releasing pure hydrogen, using a non-precious metal catalyst at temperatures below 450 °C.

On the ROOTS side, DOE said Colorado State University will receive more than $6 million to develop a "field-deployable ground robotic platform with a suite of sensor technologies" to investigate crop genetic-environment interaction and the chemical cycling of carbon and nitrogen in the soil.