ARPA-E INVESTMENTS IN CO2 CAPTURE PROVING TO BE ‘GOOD VALUE,’ OFFICIAL SAYS

Tamar Hallerman

GHG Monitor

07/13/12

PITTSBURGH—A nearly $50 million Department of Energy investment in ‘high-risk, high-reward’ carbon capture technologies is yielding fruit as smaller-scale R&D and pilot work wraps up for many projects, one department official said here. In a speech at the National Energy Technology Laboratory’s CO2 Capture Technology Meeting this week, Karma Sawyer, an assistant program director at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), said that nearly two dozen post-combustion carbon capture technologies being funded through the  Innovative Materials and Processes for Advanced Carbon Capture Technologies (IMPACCT) program are proving to be a “good value” for R&D dollars being spent to lower the costs and energy penalties associated with carbon capture. “What we’re trying to do is really provide a lot of technology options for the people who are funding things at later stages,” Sawyer said during her speech. “We put initial money in so that there are more people in the CCS space and more opportunities for there to be new technologies available for the applied research programs in the future.”  

Since ARPA-E issued its first broad funding opportunity announcement in 2009, the IMPACCT program has helped issue relatively small grants of a few million dollars apiece to nearly two dozen carbon capture technologies—mostly post-combustion capture retrofits—totaling just shy of $50 million, Sawyer said. Most of those projects—which include solvents, membranes, sorbents and even a chemical looping capture technology—were funded for two-to-three-year periods, with the bulk wrapping up work by fall 2013. While several have folded prematurely—ARPA-E rescinded funding for electrochemical and enzyme analogue-induced capture projects earlier this year for failing to meet project milestones—Sawyer said that other technologies being funded are becoming “de-risked” and could see further development thanks in part to initial ARPA-E seed funding. “We chose these kinds of crazy ideas at the beginning of our program and made them so that they don’t seem quite as crazy by answering the major questions—that way it becomes more palatable for people to take these different approaches more seriously in the more applied spaces of the energy field,” Sawyer said in an interview. She added that while some projects being funded are evaluating for proof of concept, others are testing the technologies directly on flue gas or other mixtures that have a similar temperature and composition to conditions found in coal plants.

Goal for DOE, Industry to Continue Funding Technologies

As IMPACCT projects begin winding down their ARPA-E work, the ultimate goal is for entities like the Office of Fossil Energy, NETL or the private sector to continue work on successful capture technologies that have been “de-risked,” Sawyer said. “The bench-scale programs and the research that the Office of Fossil Energy is doing in the post-combustion capture space is really an ideal space for follow-on funding for the IMPACCT program,” she said. “That transition is something that we had in mind the entire time.” Sawyer said that FE and NETL have had an active relationship with ARPA-E’s IMPACCT program since its inception. While no new FE or NETL funding opportunity announcements have been applicable to IMPACCT-funded technologies since the program’s inception, Sawyer said she hopes that many of the technologies will be able to receive additional funding and testing through those programs in the future.

Part of the necessity to hand off the technologies to entities like FE is because ARPA-E does not have the funding or capacity to test any of them on a commercial scale, Sawyer said, adding that scale-up has been the biggest challenge for many IMPACCT projects to date. “While I would love to be able to put in $2 million and de-risk something enough so that it will be deployed at a power plant…because of our small budget, ARPA-E is not in the position at this point to test technologies that are intended to work on the scale of a coal plant,” Sawyer said. “That doesn’t mean that we can’t de-risk things enough that other people who have less risk tolerance would be willing to invest in them, and that’s really what our goal is.”

IMPACCT’s Direction Could Shift Moving Forward

While Sawyer said she has been optimistic about IMPACCT’s projects to date, the direction of the program could shift dramatically moving forward. Program directors at ARPA-E are hired on a temporary three-year basis, seen as a way to always keep ideas within the program fresh. With previous IMPACCT director Mark Hartney having recently departed, whoever fills his shoes will have a lot of discretion over the future direction of the program. At this point, though, Sawyer said she was unsure whether post-combustion capture will continue to be emphasized once a new IMPACCT director is installed. Also unclear, Sawyer said, is whether there will be another round of IMPACCT projects, though there is currently an ARPA-E-wide funding solicitation from which carbon capture projects are still eligible.

ARPA-E faces additional uncertainty surrounding its funding allocation for upcoming budget cycles, which could put any future ventures in jeopardy. While the Obama Administration proposed a 27 percent budget increase for FY2013 above the program’s currently enacted level to $350 million, the House passed a budget that allocates only $200 million for the program. The Senate version of the bill that passed the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this year allocates $312 million for the program.