DOE ANNOUCES $1.8M FOR SMALL BUSINESS CCS PROJECTS

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/10/13

The Department of Energy announced roughly $1.8 million in new funding this week for a dozen carbon capture and storage-related energy technology projects run by small businesses. The Department said May 9 that its Office of Fossil Energy would be funding 12 projects run by small businesses with roughly $150,000 a piece for projects related to CO2 capture and compression, carbon storage and cross-cutting fossil energy research.

The grants are part of a larger 88-project, $16 million Department-wide effort announced this week to develop what DOE described as “innovative” clean energy technologies “with a strong potential for commercialization and job creation.” “The grants announced today are just the latest step in the Energy Department’s efforts to support the critical role that small businesses are playing in creating jobs for American workers and expanding our country’s clean energy economy,” acting Secretary of Energy Dan Poneman said in a statement. “These businesses are helping to reduce our dependence on imported oil and to protect our air and water, while ensuring that the United States leads in the global clean energy race.”

Organized by research type, the CCS-related projects being funded by the initiative are:

Carbon Dioxide Capture and Compression

• Ion Engineering LLC in Boulder, Colo., for “Functionalized Imidazoles for Enhanced Solvent-Based Post-Combustion CO2 Capture,” which use advanced solvents to provide an “economical and energy efficient means of drastically reducing emissions while continuing to utilize conventional fuel sources for electric power generation”;
• Innosepra LLC in Middlesex, N.J., for “Energy and Capital-Efficient Sorbent-Based CO2 Capture,” which aims to demonstrate the company’s CO2 capture process;
• Creare Inc. in Hanover, N.H., for “Efficient and Robust Gerotor Compression System for CO2 Capture,” an advanced compressor technology that could help reduce the cost of CCS; and
• Envergex LLC in Sturbridge, Mass., for “High Capacity Sorbent and Process for CO2 Capture,” a technology that “harnesses the synergy between unique sorbents” developed by the company to capture CO2 from flue gas at a lower cost than current technologies. 

Carbon Storage Technologies

• Montana Emergent Technologies, In
• c. in Butte, Mont., for “Using Biomineralization Sealing for Leakage Mitigation in Shale during CO2 Sequestration,” a biomineralization technology that can seal abandoned wells at a reduced cost;
• Compact Membrane Systems, Inc. in Newport, Del., for “Membrane Facilitated Dimethyl Carbonate Production from Carbon Dioxide,” a separation membrane that could “significantly reduce” the cost of converting captured CO2 to DMC, a high value chemical;
• Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc. in Torrance, Calif., for “Fiber Optic O2/CO2 Sensor to Monitor Atmospheric Leakage at CO2 Injection Sites,” fiber optic sensors that could cover large areas to detect any leaks at CO2 injection sites while also distinguishing between reservoir leakage and natural CO2 sources; and
• Porifera Inc. in Hayward, Calif., for “Forward Osmosis-based System for Treatment of Waste Water Generated during Energy Production using Waste Carbon Dioxide and Waste Heat,” a system that can “synergistically capture carbon and treat wastewater at power plants” with a higher water recovery rate.

Crosscutting Fossil Energy Research

• Nextech Materials, Ltd. in Lewis Center, Ohio, for “Diffusion Based Aluminide Coatings for High-Temperature Corrosion Protection of Stainless Steels,” a “protective aluminide/alumina coating” for steel alloys used in power generation using a lower cost and scalable aluminization process;
• Micromaterials, Inc. in Tampa, Fla., for “Low Cost Fiber Optic Temperature Sensor,” a low-cost and high-temperature tolerant fiber optic thermometer;
• Cfd Research Corp. in Huntsville, Ala., for “GPU-Accelerated Multiphase Eulerian-Lagrangian Solver with Adaptive Mesh Refinement,” creating a “multiphase flow simulation tool” for “general purpose graphics processing units” to cheaply speed up conventional desktop and workstations; and
• Tech4Imaging LLC in Columbus, Ohio for  “Real-Time 3-D Volume Imaging and Mass-Gauging of High Temperature Flows and Power System Components in a Fossil Fuel Reactor Using Electrical Capacitance Volume Tomography,” to develop advanced power plant instrumentation to “help increase efficiencies and lower emissions of power generation processes” based on developing capacitance sensors.