Episode 79 | Subsurface Solution | NETL





For those who consider carbon emissions an existential threat, the National Energy Technology Laboratory at Department of Energy is leading the way in its most promising solution.

Carbon storage is the process of compressing and injecting CO2 into the earth. Since 2003, NETL's Regional Sequestration Partnerships Initiative has identified between 2 and 22 trillion metric tons of room for CO2 under the U.S. and Canada. These include:


Andrea, McNemar, my guest, is carbon storage technology manager for NETL—in Morgantown, West Virginia. She says the partnerships have completed 19 small-scale field projects and 7 large scale (>1M mT injected) projects.

I asked about the relationships between power producers and oil and gas folks, who rarely work together, but for a project like this have to be inseparable.

"The first meetings where they tried to get partners together, you had your power plant people in one side of the room and your geologist on the other side, and they didn’t know how to talk to each other," says Andrea. "Over the last two decades, those groups have been able to come together and understand each other's needs more." She credits the partnerships for that.

Andrea says the challenges can be both technical and non-technical (i.e. permitting and public acceptance). The regional strategy helps because these issues can be addressed a few states at a time.

The EPA helped clarify rules for CO2 injection in 2010, when it introduced rules for "Class VI" injection wells, dedicated solely to carbon dioxide. Andrea says North Dakota is currently the only state that has rules that supersede the EPA. Projects pay into a state trust fund that monitors injected CO2 indefinitely.

We have discussed Enhanced Oil Recovery in past episodes. NRG demonstrated that CO2 used for this process can create a revenue stream. However, saline injection has no profit driver.

In 2018, Congress passed an expanded form of the 45Q tax incentive. This gives storage projects $35/mT of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery projects and $50/mT for storage (i.e. saline injection, that do not produce hydrocarbons).

Andrea believes ethanol producers may take advantage of 45Q before power producers. Though a tax incentive would certainly lighten the load, power producers would still have to install carbon capture equipment. Ethanol facilities produce pure CO2 as a byproduct—no need for gas separation equipment.

Andrea says her group is working closely with the capture teams and others to make Carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) more affordable. She cites efforts to make compression more affordable (CO2 needs to be supercritical for injection) and even direct-air carbon capture.

All of which leads deep into the earth instead of up in the atmosphere.

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