[Senate Hearing 117-122]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
S. Hrg. 117-122
OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES THAT EXIST FOR ADVANCING AND DEPLOYING
CARBON AND CARBON-DIOXIDE (CO2) UTILIZATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE UNITED
STATES
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HEARING
BEFORE THE
COMMITTEE ON
ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
APRIL 22, 2021
__________
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Printed for the use of the
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
44-470 WASHINGTON : 2022
COMMITTEE ON ENERGY AND NATURAL RESOURCES
JOE MANCHIN III, West Virginia, Chairman
RON WYDEN, Oregon JOHN BARRASSO, Wyoming
MARIA CANTWELL, Washington JAMES E. RISCH, Idaho
BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont MIKE LEE, Utah
MARTIN HEINRICH, New Mexico STEVE DAINES, Montana
MAZIE K. HIRONO, Hawaii LISA MURKOWSKI, Alaska
ANGUS S. KING, JR., Maine JOHN HOEVEN, North Dakota
CATHERINE CORTEZ MASTO, Nevada JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
MARK KELLY, Arizona BILL CASSIDY, Louisiana
JOHN W. HICKENLOOPER, Colorado CINDY HYDE-SMITH, Mississippi
ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas
Renae Black, Staff Director
Sam E. Fowler, Chief Counsel
Armando Avila, Senior Professional Staff Member
Richard M. Russell, Republican Staff Director
Matthew H. Leggett, Republican Chief Counsel
Kate Farr, Republican Counsel
Darla Ripchensky, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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OPENING STATEMENTS
Page
Manchin III, Hon. Joe, Chairman and a U.S. Senator from West
Virginia....................................................... 1
Barrasso, Hon. John, Ranking Member and a U.S. Senator from
Wyoming........................................................ 3
WITNESSES
Anderson, Dr. Brian, Director, National Energy Technology
Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy.......................... 6
Begger, Jason, Managing Director, Wyoming Integrated Test Center. 16
Sant, Dr. Gaurav N., Professor and Henry Samueli Fellow,
Departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Materials
Science and Engineering, and the California Nanosystems
Institute; and Faculty Director, Institute for Carbon
Management, UCLA; and Founder and CTO, CarbonBuilt, Inc........ 23
Atkins, Randall W., Chairman and Chief Executive, Ramaco Coal.... 33
ALPHABETICAL LISTING AND APPENDIX MATERIAL SUBMITTED
Anderson, Dr. Brian:
Opening Statement............................................ 6
Written Testimony............................................ 9
Questions for the Record..................................... 118
Atkins, Randall W.:
Opening Statement............................................ 33
Written Testimony............................................ 35
Responses to Questions for the Record........................ 124
Barrasso, Hon. John:
Opening Statement............................................ 3
Article from the Gillette News Record entitled ``Case study:
ITC has potential to be prominent in CO2 research,
breakthroughs'' by Greg Johnson, dated 4/10/2021........... 5
Begger, Jason:
Opening Statement............................................ 16
Written Testimony............................................ 18
Responses to Questions for the Record........................ 119
Manchin III, Hon. Joe:
Opening Statement............................................ 1
Resources for the Future:
Issue Brief (21-03) for the Record........................... 126
Sant, Dr. Gaurav N.:
Opening Statement............................................ 23
Written Testimony............................................ 26
Responses to Questions for the Record........................ 122
OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES THAT EXIST FOR ADVANCING AND DEPLOYING
CARBON AND CARBON-DIOXIDE (CO2) UTILIZATION TECHNOLOGIES IN THE UNITED
STATES
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THURSDAY, APRIL 22, 2021
U.S. Senate,
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources,
Washington, DC.
The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:05 a.m. in
Room SD-366, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joe Manchin
III, Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOE MANCHIN III,
U.S. SENATOR FROM WEST VIRGINIA
The Chairman. We are here today to discuss carbon
utilization, the innovative process of taking carbon and clear
stream CO2 from industrial and power plants and out
of the air and around us and turning it into valuable products.
This is innovation at work, and it is shifting our perspective
on how harmful emissions can instead be harnessed and put to
good use. And what a timely discussion, given that today is
Earth Day, to talk about this intersection of climate solutions
and economic potential. I look forward to hearing from our
panel of witnesses about barriers to scaling up these
opportunities and the ways that we can support the advancement
and deployment of carbon utilization.
Congress has made significant efforts in recent years to
support carbon utilization technologies and projects. In order
to get CCUS deployed at the scale we need, it is critical that
we invest in research, development, demonstration, and
deployment of the entire CCUS value chain from capturing
CO2 from coal and natural gas power plants and
industrial facilities, to utilizing or sequestering that
CO2. That is why the Energy Act contained over $6
billion in authorization for CCUS, including over $280 million
specifically for carbon utilization, including coal-to-products
demonstration projects and a new carbon utilization research
center. As Chairman, I am committed to ensuring the
implementation of those provisions. We need to couple these
efforts with necessary modifications to the 45Q tax credit to
really incentivize the deployment of these projects and
advancing legislation like the SCALE Act, a comprehensive
CO2 infrastructure package that I was pleased to co-
sponsor and happy to see included in President Biden's
Infrastructure Plan.
Nearly all studies have examined the potential pathways to
net-zero carbon by 2050 have found a need for significant
amount of carbon capture and carbon removal. Dr. Birol of the
non-partisan, International Energy Agency (IEA), has
consistently said, CCUS could be the most critical technology
for us to invest in to meet our climate goals. I am proud of
the work that National Energy Technology Lab, NETL, based in
Morgantown, West Virginia, is doing under the leadership of Dr.
Brian Anderson, one of our presenters today, to lead the way in
CCUS efforts in the development of technologies to use coal in
new ways. So I want to welcome Dr. Anderson. I look forward to
hearing more about the innovative work being done at NETL.
Carbon utilization has substantial economic and
environmental potential and should be a key part of
conversations around economic revitalization. By 2030, the
CO2 utilization market, sized for products like
concrete, fuels and chemicals, has potential to reach over $800
billion. This would represent about seven gigatons of
CO2, equivalent to 15 percent of global emissions.
In addition, the use of coal as feedstock to produce high value
products is a promising field. These new uses for coal can
produce products superior in quality and durability to
conventional ones, including certain lightweight, high-strength
building products and materials like carbon fiber. The demand
for carbon fiber, graphite and graphene will experience double
digit annual growth in the years ahead. These new uses for coal
also have potential to provide new economic opportunities and
revitalize traditional energy producing communities, who have
been hit the hardest by the energy transition.
Ramaco Coal is leading the way in the development of coal-
to-products. I look forward to hearing from Mr. Randy Atkins
about the work that they are doing.
I am heartened by the commitment to carbon utilization
shown by industry and research partners. I am pleased to
welcome two of our witnesses who were involved in the Carbon
XPRIZE, a five-year, global competition that challenged
innovators to develop breakthrough technologies to convert
CO2 into high net value products. Teams across the
globe participated and demonstrated the value of CO2
in a wide range of products, including alcohol used in vodka
and sanitizers, plastics and batteries and even toothpaste. Mr.
Jason Begger is the Managing Director of the Wyoming Integrated
Test Center which provided the U.S. site for this competition
and Dr. Gaurav Sant is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer
of CarbonBuilt, who just this week was announced as one of the
two winners of the XPRIZE for their work to embed industrial
CO2 emissions into concrete, helping reduce the
carbon footprint of concrete by more than 50 percent. So
congratulations to Dr. Sant. I look forward to hearing more
about your technology experience and the future opportunities
for this breakthrough technology.
In closing, let me reiterate the tremendous potential of
carbon utilization to support our environmental and economic
objectives. We have an incredible panel of experts with us
today who are directly engaged in developing these
technologies, and I look forward to this conversation.
With that, I am going to turn to Ranking Member, Senator
Barrasso, for his opening remarks.
STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN BARRASSO,
U.S. SENATOR FROM WYOMING
Senator Barrasso. Well, thanks so very much, Mr. Chairman.
I am delighted to be here with these wonderful people who are
going to be testifying and sharing their thoughts and ideas
with us.
You know, the International Energy Agency has repeatedly
stated that if the world is going to meet its goal in
addressing climate change, we will need carbon capture,
utilization and storage, period. Earlier this year the
Executive Director of the International Energy Agency testified
before this very Committee in this room that carbon capture is
an extremely important technology for reducing carbon
emissions. That is why I have been a long champion of carbon
capture technologies. In 2008, I introduced a bill called the
Greenhouse Gas Emission Atmospheric Removal Act. I did this
along with former Chairman of this Committee, Senator Jeff
Bingaman, a Democrat from New Mexico, who was Senator
Heinrich's predecessor on this Committee. More recently, I have
worked successfully with a bipartisan group of Senators,
including Senator Manchin, our Chairman, to expand the 45Q tax
credit for carbon capture, utilization and sequestration. Last
year, along with a bipartisan group of Senators, we
successfully worked to enact the USE IT Act. The USE IT Act
supports carbon capture, utilization and sequestration
technology. It expedites the permitting of important
infrastructure like carbon dioxide pipelines. It helps
researchers find commercial uses for captured carbon dioxide
emissions.
Carbon dioxide emissions can be transformed to create
numerous products, including clothing from carbon foams, carbon
fiber, building materials like cement and concrete and even, as
the Chairman mentioned, hand sanitizer. And of course, Wyoming
is on the cutting edge of carbon capture research and
innovation. In 2018, the State of Wyoming joined with several
rural electric cooperatives to open the Integrated Test Center
in Gillette, Wyoming. The Integrated Test Center provides space
for research teams to test carbon capture, utilization and
sequestration technologies. The Center gives these teams the
opportunity to use carbon dioxide emissions directly from Basin
Electric's coal-fired power plant in Gillette. I have toured
the Center several times, always impressed by the projects
underway at the facility.
Last summer we actually had a Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee Field Hearing at the Center. After the hearing,
research teams provided hands-on demonstrations of their
groundbreaking work and one of those teams was CarbonBuilt, who
is being represented here today and recently won the prize, as
you just mentioned, Mr. Chairman, the XPRIZE. CarbonBuilt used
captured emissions in its concrete manufacturing technology. It
was a finalist for the Carbon XPRIZE, a research competition to
drive innovation in carbon capture, utilization and
sequestration technologies. And on Monday, the Carbon XPRIZE
announced its winners and CarbonBuilt was among them.
Mr. Chairman, I will point out I got an email last night
from Senator Whitehouse. He joined you and me and Senator
Cantwell when we visited one of the teams that was working as
well on doing exactly that form of research. They competed, and
the team that is here today was the victor. So we have been
following this closely, you and I have, along with Senator
Cantwell, Senator Murkowski and Senator Whitehouse. We are
delighted to have the founder of CarbonBuilt, Dr. Sant, who has
joined us here today and congratulations, again, to you and
your entire team.
You know, earlier this month a newspaper in Gillette,
Wyoming, Gillette News Record, did a story called ``Case study:
Integrated Test Center has potential to be prominent in
CO2 research, breakthroughs.'' The picture as you
will see, Dr. Sant, is of--you may not be able to see it, but I
know you have seen it before--of Iman Mehdipour of CarbonBuilt
walking into where the work has been done in Gillette at the
coal-fired power plant and the carbon capture facility. The end
of the article, the author, the newsman reports, ``The world
needs an important and often overlooked Wyoming natural
resource--innovation.'' And that is what you and I have talked
about, Mr. Chairman, the need for innovation in the work as
opposed to regulation and taxation.
[The article referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
Senator Barrasso. So these are great opportunities for
coal-to-product technologies as well and we have someone to
testify to that today. Raw coal can be mined, treated and
refined to separate the carbon content and then used in high-
tech, high-value products. These products include carbon fiber,
activated carbon and graphene. Last year, Mr. Chairman, you and
Senator Capito and I introduced the COAL TeCC Act, which stands
for ``Creating Opportunities and Leveraging Technologies for
Coal Carbon.'' Our legislation directs the Department of Energy
to initiate pilot programs to help bring coal-to-product
technologies to market. So I am very pleased to see that key
sections of our bill were enacted as part of the 2020 Energy
Act.
Today, Mr. Chairman, we are going to discuss the
opportunities and the challenges facing both carbon capture and
coal-to-products technologies. So before we begin, I want to
thank you for putting this Committee meeting together and I
want to welcome Jason Begger, who is the Managing Director of
Wyoming's Integrated Test Center. Jason has testified before
the Senate several times, including at a Field Hearing at our
Integrated Test Center last summer in Gillette. I would also
like to welcome Randy Atkins, who is the CEO of Ramaco Coal.
Randy is establishing a coal-to-products research facility in
Sheridan, Wyoming. Finally, I want to thank all the witnesses
for testifying and participating today and look forward to the
conversation.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
With that, I will finish the introductions here. We want to
thank all of our witnesses for participating today, and I think
it is going to be a very, very interesting and very informative
hearing. It will be quite hectic today. We have some votes
coming up, and we are going to be going in and out, but we are
going to keep this alive and we will have people by WebEx and
we will have Senators coming in too.
I want to introduce Dr. Brian Anderson. Brian is the
Director of the National Energy Technology Lab in Morgantown,
West Virginia.
We also have Mr. Jason Begger, the Managing Director of the
Wyoming Integrated Test Center.
We also have Dr. Gaurav Sant, Professor of UCLA's Institute
for Carbon Management, and Founder and Chief Technology Officer
of CarbonBuilt, Inc.
And then we have also, Mr. Randall Atkins, the Chief
Executive Officer of Ramaco Coal.
We will start today with Dr. Brian Anderson for his opening
remarks.
STATEMENT OF DR. BRIAN ANDERSON, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ENERGY
TECHNOLOGY LABORATORY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
Dr. Anderson. Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member Barrasso and
honored Committee members, thank you for this opportunity to
discuss advanced carbon and carbon dioxide----
The Chairman. Can you turn it up a little bit?
Dr. Anderson. ----utilization technologies today.
My name is Dr. Brian Anderson. I'm the Director of the U.S.
Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory,
or NETL. Our research and development campuses are located in
Morgantown, West Virginia; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania----
The Chairman. Brian, excuse me, on your mic, you are going
up and down. If you get closer to your mic. Let's try it again.
We've got so far, but just start talking again. We'll see
if we can control it on this end. We're trying to get your
volume up a little more.
Dr. Anderson. Sure.
The Chairman. There we go. Now it is perfect. Perfect.
Dr. Anderson. Okay, perfect.
So our mission at NETL is to drive innovation and deliver
solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous
energy future. We develop technologies to manage carbon across
the full life cycle--and have for many, many decades--that
enables environmental sustainability for all Americans. So
today, I want to discuss our decarbonization technologies and
the opportunities that exist for advancing and deploying carbon
and CO2 utilization technologies in the U.S.
First, I'll speak to our, NETL's, advanced carbon products
research which serve to develop high-value products from coal,
aims to support communities that are impacted by the energy
transition, both in past and in the future and to help
translate those skills that they have for advanced
manufacturing jobs. We are converting coal into high-value
carbon nanomaterials with the potential to reduce manufacturing
costs and energy consumption while simultaneously improving
performance. Coal is an ideal product, ideal for producing
graphene type nanomaterials that can be used in electronics,
composite plastics, batteries, water filtration systems and 3D
printing materials. We have also used coal-based additives to
improve the strength of cement and concrete materials by 15 or
30, 35 percent which can be used to reduce building cost and
the volume of construction materials. Our R&D on emerging
carbon-based building materials is necessary to renovate these
materials as suitable for construction purposes, including
ensuring compliance with the strictest health and environmental
requirements for building materials for metals.
So a few of our partnerships. We're partnered with the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Ramaco Carbon,
to use domestic coal to manufacture energy-efficient computer
memory chips. This technology can be used to enable the next
generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning and
I'm sure you'll hear more from Mr. Atkins on Ramaco's work.
We're collaborating with X-MAT in West Virginia to establish
the utility of Coal-Derived Building Materials licensed from
their partner, Semplastics, out of Florida. The University of
Wyoming researchers are collaborating with NETL to develop
coal-derived carbon building materials from Powder River Basin
coal pyrolysis products. Two of the building components can
contain more than 70 percent carbon have been proposed, their
char-based concrete brick and another carbon-based structural
unit. By the way, NETL has partnered with CFOAM in West
Virginia to develop carbon foam panels and lightweight
aggregates from coal at atmospheric pressure. There are coal-
derived carbon foams that are being produced commercially via
big batch processes at elevated pressure, primarily for the use
in composite tooling applications for the aerospace industry.
And now I'd like to speak briefly about NETL's
CO2 conversion and CO2 utilization
research. Our carbon utilization research aims to develop
technologies to transform CO2 into valuable products
in an efficient, economical and environmentally friendly
manner. The emerging field of CO2 utilization
encompasses many possible products and applications: fuels,
chemicals, food and feeds, construction materials, enhanced
resource recovery, energy storage, wastewater treatment and
many others. We have developed new catalysts that can use
electricity to convert CO2 and methane into chemical
building blocks and energy carriers. These inventions can allow
the development of modular reactors that can use intermittent
renewable energy, renewable electricity, to produce carbon
negative commodity chemicals. We are partnered with the West
Virginia University, the University of Pittsburgh and Longview
Power to develop and test at the laboratory scale an innovative
technology to produce commercial quality sodium bicarbonate
directly from CO2 from coal-fired power plant flue
gas. In Dr. Sant's testimony you'll hear about CarbonBuilt's
process to develop concrete blocks using CO2 from
power plant flue gas without the need for the carbon capture
step. It's been demonstrated by more than 1,200 hours of field
testing at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, represented this
morning by Mr. Begger. We're also working with Acadian Research
& Development in Wyoming to synthesize a catalyst for the
process to reduce CO2 to synthetic graphite.
As discussed in the intros by the Chairman and Ranking
Member, full decarbonization of the electricity sector by 2035
will require a combination of renewable resources, energy
storage and reliable no- and low-carbon generation to assure
reliability and affordability in our electric sector.
Dispatchable fossil energy with CCUS can play an important role
in conjunction with grid-scale energy storage for grid
reliability during the energy transition. Our carbon reducing
technologies are critical to managing carbon emissions in
industries beyond electricity such as oil refineries and
facilities that produce hydrogen, ethanol, cement or steel. In
addition to carbon reducing technologies, negative emission
technologies such as direct air capture and storage or
bioenergy with CCUS and mineralization will play a pivotal role
in managing carbon in long-term. We've been developing plans
for a Direct Air Capture Center for evaluating emerging
technologies in direct air capture.
So in conclusion, science, technology and research are
powerful drivers of innovation and sustainable economic growth.
Thank you for the opportunity to discuss some of these cutting-
edge innovations which have application within and well beyond
the energy sector.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Anderson follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Anderson.
Next, we are going to hear from Mr. Jason Begger.
STATEMENT OF JASON BEGGER, MANAGING DIRECTOR, WYOMING
INTEGRATED TEST CENTER
Mr. Begger. All right.
Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member Barrasso, members of the
Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today.
My name is Jason Begger and I'm the Managing Director of the
Wyoming Integrated Test Center (ITC) which is a private-public
partnership between the State of Wyoming, Basin Electric Power
Cooperative, Tri-State Transmission and Generation Association
and the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. The
ITC is the largest post-combustion research facility in the
U.S. and is located at Basin Electric's Dry Fork Power Station.
It is important to remember that post-combustion technologies
are not just for coal plants. They can be utilized at other
industrial facilities such as cement plants and steel smelters.
There's a significant need for these processes in non-energy
applications. All ITC funding has come from the State of
Wyoming and our utility partners. While we believe there's an
important role for the Federal Government to play in advancing
technology and we would welcome such a partnership, no federal
funding has been utilized, although some of our research
tenants have received DOE grants to conduct their projects.
CCUS requires both the capture of CO2 and then
permanently doing something with it to ensure it is not
released into the atmosphere. The ITC is unique in that it can
host both types of technologies. Two important considerations
for CCUS technologies are the amount of CO2 utilized
and the cost of the process. For things such as EOR [enhanced
oil recovery], geological sequestration and mineralization, the
CO2 rich flue gas generally only needs to be
captured and compressed. Plus, they can utilize vast
quantities. Other technologies can be much more expensive.
CO2 is a very stable molecule with a double covalent
bond so for technologies needing to break apart the atom, this
requires a lot of energy leading to higher costs. Nonetheless,
all are important and we need many options to successfully
utilize large volumes of CO2.
As was previously mentioned, the ITC hosted the Energy
COSIA Carbon XPRIZE, but we are also working on a joint project
with the government of Japan and Columbia University taking
CO2 and fly ash to produce carbonates which have a
variety of industrial uses. One application is silica which is
used to create polysilicate, a critical component of solar
panels. Currently, 80 percent of the global supply originates
in a region in China with serious human rights concerns. It is
possible we could use CO2 from a coal plant to
produce components for the renewable industry. While
programmatic funding is extremely important, Congress also
needs to provide the means to carry out these projects by
supporting the places where research can occur. NETL and the
National Carbon Capture Center are great research facilities
but limited in size and DOE has been sending American
developers with U.S. taxpayer funded grants to test in Norway
because there is not a facility large enough to test in this
country. The ITC can host larger projects at better value to
taxpayers with some additional infrastructure. We have the
perfect blank canvas. Now we need to fill it. There is no
better place than Wyoming to conduct this type of research. We
have the facilities, suitable geology, regulatory agencies with
expertise in regulating CO2 and a ``get to yes''
mentality toward permitting and supportive legislature and
governor and last, public support for these types of projects.
Fourteen years ago, Apple released the first iPhone which
came with four gigs of memory, a two-megapixel camera, no
flash, no zoom, no video camera. Today's iPhone 12 has 512 gigs
of storage, facial recognition, four cameras and HD video
recording capabilities. Yes, today's CCUS technology is still
evolving, but as we know technology gets better and less
expensive over time. We need to think about energy technology
as we do with the things we utilize every day and appreciate
how early government support made them possible. Touch screen
glass, a staple of today's smart phone was developed in the
U.K. in the 1960s for air traffic control applications. GPS,
canned food, microwave ovens, the Internet, microchips,
vaccines and nylon are all items developed by federal research.
Technology is apolitical and the U.S. can make its greatest
impact by investing in the knowledge that can be utilized
around the world. Technology is the best way to ensure these
countries have access to power while meeting environmental
goals.
I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today, and
I'll gladly answer your questions. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Begger follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you, Mr. Begger.
Next, we are going to have Dr. Gaurav Sant. I hope I
pronounced that right, sir. I am sorry if I didn't.
STATEMENT OF DR. GAURAV N. SANT, PROFESSOR AND HENRY SAMUELI
FELLOW, DEPARTMENTS OF CIVIL AND ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEERING,
MATERIALS SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, AND THE CALIFORNIA
NANOSYSTEMS INSTITUTE; AND FACULTY DIRECTOR, INSTITUTE FOR
CARBON MANAGEMENT, UCLA; AND FOUNDER AND CTO, CARBONBUILT, INC.
Dr. Sant. Close enough, Gaurav.
The Chairman. Am I close?
Dr. Sant. Very close.
[Laughter.]
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Sant. Of course. Chairman Manchin, Ranking Member
Barrasso and members of the Committee, thank you for having me
here today. There are five things that I want to really try and
highlight.
Number one, of course, carbon dioxide utilization is really
a key part of achieving our carbon reduction goals. This is
foremost for its ability, not simply to provide a revenue
queuing and a cost-
effective pathway, but it's potentially one of the soonest
pathways that we can really catalyze for carbon management.
Second, when we think about really expanded investments, we
have to think about expanded investment in carbon capture,
utilization and storage across the entire life cycle,
particularly I think what is important to highlight is to
really place a special focus on grant-making mechanisms that
support full-scale, commercial demonstration plants. These
demonstration plants are needed, particularly not only to deal
us technologies and retrain our workforce, but particularly to
gain operational maintenance and production management
experience with new processes and relevant skills. This is
something that we've done on an extremely limited manner so far
and this is something that needs to be greatly expanded.
Importantly, this kind of experiential familiarity is extremely
important to diffuse U.S. technologies across the world to
enhance the competitiveness.
We've looked at the idea of transforming carbon dioxide out
of concrete and this is really, in our opinion, an extremely
effective approach for carbon utilization for a couple of
reasons. Number one, the enormous scale of the construction
industry, the relatively simple chemistry that's offered with
this conversion and the permanence of immobilization. And I
think this is something that we really want to highlight that
when we think about carbon dioxide utilization, we want to
think about permanence and the durability of immobilization as
important aspects of carbon management. CarbonBuilt, a spinout
company from UCLA's Samueli School of Engineering, is
commercializing a technology of the sort that converts carbon
dioxide into concrete and importantly, like Dr. Anderson just
pointed out, it does it without a need for a carbon capture
step. This work, you know, which has been funded by the Office
of Fossil Energy's Carbon Utilization and Carbon Capture
programs, is invaluable when we think about infrastructure
renewal and infrastructure construction in the United States.
And the reason is really simple because if we can enable
construction at a really large scale with low carbon concrete,
this is a significant and a catalytic means to create carbon
dioxide utilization as a mainstream market opportunity.
Fourth, we want to think about strategic government actions
and strategic government actions are really required when we
think about how we would catalyze some of these markets. By
strategic government actions, I'm particularly alluding to the
need to ensure low carbon procurement and purchasing in the
form of ``Buy Clean'' type of ideas, ``Buy Clean'' type of
concepts, which look both at the cost and the carbon intensity
of products and materials when we think about not simply
construction, but the broad economy around us. In this regard,
it's important to create incentives both for early-stage
innovative companies and established corporations.
Historically, we've looked at ideas like a tax credit and while
a tax credit is a great way to offset a tax liability, for
early-stage companies we need to look at concepts like a direct
payment that's based on production capacity and production
levels, really as a means to catalyze the sector.
Furthermore, when we think about carbon dioxide
utilization, we need to really think about 45Q. And when we
think about 45Q in the context of utilization we need to look
at really reducing the cap on a qualifying project. The cap on
a qualifying project, I think, on the order of law 25,000
tonnes, is simply too large and it needs to be reduced to a
number on the area of about 2,000 tonnes to really make a
difference for a utilization project. The reasons for this are
really simple. We'll likely not achieve utilization in a small,
delocalized manner across many different sites, close to
consumption centers, aka, close to markets. It makes a lot more
sense to have modular, smaller-scale plants which really are
producing products and materials close to where they're going
to be sold because this is what minimizes transport cost,
particularly important when we think about commodity materials,
you know, things like concrete.
The last thing I want to touch on is really a need for
national databases. We lack national databases which have the
tabulated data regarding the carbon intensity of materials and
products and which follow, essentially, a rigorous review and
standardized procedures for assessment of carbon intensity.
This is important, not only for materials like concrete and
steel and insulation materials, but it's important in general
for products and services. These databases are important
because they offer credible, technology neutral in an unbiased
way to compare carbon efficiency intensity and improvements
thereof which released, starts to give us an unbiased basis to
rank and order materials and think about how incentives and
credits could accrue as a function of the technology that's
being deployed. Importantly, national databases of the sort are
also important because they provide public transparency and an
important part of what we're really thinking about is really
allowing consumers and purchasers to make decisions about the
products and the services that they would buy where if they
wanted to buy low carbon products and low carbon services, they
have the ability to consult a national database before making a
purchasing decision.
With that said, I'd like to conclude, and I'm happy to take
questions as we go further.
[The prepared statement of Dr. Sant follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you, Doctor.
Next and finally, we have Mr. Randall Atkins.
Randall?
STATEMENT OF RANDALL W. ATKINS, CHAIRMAN AND
CHIEF EXECUTIVE, RAMACO COAL
Mr. Atkins. Senators of the Committee, it is an honor to
appear before you today and I would especially like to thank
Chairman Manchin and Ranking Member Barrasso, who are both from
two states that I proudly call home, as well as where our
companies have their operations.
Coal today is basically thought of as a cheap,
controversial, environmentally challenged fuel combusted in
power plants. We look at the commodity, however, through an
entirely different lens in which it has a higher value purpose
beyond energy; one, frankly, where coal becomes too valuable to
burn. In our concept, coal simply stops being an emitter of
greenhouse gas. Instead, it becomes an engine of economic
progress and job growth for communities that are too often left
behind. Today, I would like to discuss briefly, a fundamentally
new, environmentally positive use for coal in which carbon
derived from this commodity serves as a low-cost, carbon
feedstock for high-value advanced carbon products and
materials. It replaces a role currently mostly served by
petroleum. This field we call coal-to-products, and we have
coined the phrase ``carbon ore'' to describe coal used in this
manner.
As an overview, I would refer the Committee to the white
paper that I'd shared in 2019 to then Secretary of Energy Perry
from the National Coal Council entitled, ``Coal in the New
Carbon Age.'' Our advances for higher value uses for coal,
borrow from developments in the United States from the earliest
20th century when coal was the basic chemical feedstock. Today,
however, most carbon products are made from petroleum
feedstocks. These are almost 40 times more expensive than the
same carbon equivalent contained in coal. We are also now
substantially behind China in pursuing this path. The IEA
estimates that China annually now uses almost 400 million tons
of coal a year to produce chemicals, fuels and fertilizers.
Their new five-year plan calls for the construction of 370 new
plants which will consume roughly a billion tons of coal by
2024. This is roughly twice the total amount of coal produced
in the United States.
We embarked on our effort roughly eight years ago
encouraged by new technological developments in advanced
materials and manufacturing. We have worked on grants for
innovative carbon research with the Department of Energy. We
have had an unparalleled partnership with the national labs,
especially the National Energy Technology Lab in both
Pittsburgh and Albany, Oregon, as well as the Oak Ridge
National Lab in Tennessee.
Today, carbon is becoming the dominant advanced material of
the 21st century. Both Senators Manchin and Barrasso mentioned
a number of the products involved. If we could take these new
carbon products and make them for less money using coal, it
could have a dramatic, positive disruption on the cost
structure of many products and industries, including
infrastructure. It would also dramatically improve the
environmental and qualitative aspects of many products and
create lots of jobs. So what carbon products and materials are
we currently pursuing? As I mentioned they've been discussed
but they include graphene, graphite, porous carbon, carbon
fiber, building products in a variety of forms, synthetic
graphites and, of course, rare earth elements.
Our recommendations are that we would ask for vastly more
funding for both carbon research as well as for the national
labs working with us. We would like equality under the 45Q tax
credit provisions. And to implement these new technologies, we
encourage ample funding and implementation of new carbon pilot
plant facilities provided for in the COAL TeCC Act. Indeed,
this summer we will open in Wyoming the first research pilot
prototype which is pictured in my materials. As a main
recommendation, however, I would encourage the development of
what I call ``Carbon Camps.'' A hundred years ago, my
grandfather worked in a company store in southern West Virginia
at what used to be called ``Coal Camps.'' I know both Senators
Manchin and Barrasso are very familiar with their history. The
21st century version of CAMP stands for ``Carbon Advanced
Materials and Product'' centers. These CAMPS can repurpose
older and existing mining areas across the country into new
mine-mouth, higher tech, net-zero emission manufacturing hubs
which NETL has estimated might create as many as 500,000 new
jobs.
In conclusion, the United States possesses the world's
largest and cheapest carbon reserves. It needs to capitalize on
that advantage and develop its own form of a carbon valley to
unlock that potential.
I thank you deeply for your time.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Atkins follows:]
[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
The Chairman. Thank you, Randy.
Now we are going to begin our questions, and I will begin.
This is going to be for all of you, and we will go down the
line. We will start with Dr. Anderson and just go down the same
as we did in speaking order.
The President, this morning, set an ambitious goal of 50
percent emissions reduction by 2030 which is extremely,
extremely aggressive from where we had been before. I was glad
to see specific inclusions of CCUS in the nationally-determined
contribution, or NDC. As I said before, in order for carbon
capture to thrive, we need to be thinking about the whole CCUS
value chain, including how to use the captured CO2
which is what you all have given your brief statements about.
We really need to advance all the many technologies that put
captured CO2 to good use, whether that be in
concrete, building materials, toothpaste or more.
The question would be, what do we need to do to get carbon
utilization to the scale we need to be able to support and
widely deploy the CCUS to help meet this ambitious, very
ambitious, climate goal?
Dr. Anderson.
Dr. Anderson. Well, Senator Manchin, thank you for that
question. I think that a lot of the direction or pathway toward
meeting that goal comes to the reduction in the cost of carbon
capture itself. So creating the low-cost feedstock of
CO2 through driving down the carbon capture cost. We
have some aggressive targets. We're sitting at around $40,
between $42 and $48 per metric ton of CO2 captured.
We want to get to $30 per metric ton of CO2 captured
to then provide that low-cost feedstock for the CO2
utilization that provides another mechanism for providing
market value.
Certainly, then continuing the efforts that we're working
on and discussing today to provide options to create other
vehicles for funding the carbon capture effort, I think, is
also critical----
The Chairman. I just want to----
Dr. Anderson. ----cost of carbon capture and conversion.
The Chairman. Thank you. I want to make sure I clarify.
There are people that will be saying that this is not feasible.
We cannot get that type of reduction in that short period of
time. That would mean you would have to eliminate using all
fossil. I don't believe that. I believe that we do have the
ability and we do have technology, if we are committed to
investing in that technology rapidly and rapidly ramping up to
meet this ambitious goal.
I think, Mr. Begger, if you could start now with your
response. I just want to know if it is feasible.
Mr. Begger. Absolutely, we just need to be able to show at
larger scales and I think that's where facilities like the ITC
come in. I think another area that we need to consider when
we're thinking about this is federal lands and permitting. If
we're going to be doing geologic sequestration, a lot of that's
going to happen on federal land.
The Chairman. And we have to accelerate our permitting
process and not put all the roadblocks and go through the court
process because it takes 10, 20, 30 years.
Mr. Begger. Absolutely, we need to be able to----
The Chairman. Okay.
Mr. Begger. ----move these things and permit them quickly.
And right now, I don't see how you could go through an entire
NEPA process to build a pipeline to seek out your
CO2.
The Chairman. Okay.
Go ahead.
Mr. Begger. I think that we need to think about the whole,
the whole chain, you know, capturing, moving it, utilizing it
in a place like Wyoming where we have such an extraordinary
volume or amount of federal lands. The federal NEPA process
certainly creates barriers when we'd look at things like where
we've got the Dry Fork Power Station, to move that
CO2 to places where it can be used and utilized. So
I think that's really important as well as the scale-up to
demonstrate----
The Chairman. Okay.
Mr. Begger. ----that these things can work at a larger
scale.
The Chairman. Okay.
Doctor.
Dr. Sant. There are three things I would touch on. Number
one, I think we need to do large-scale commercial projects. We
just cannot get away from this.
The Chairman. Can we scale up quick enough in order to meet
these----
Dr. Sant. We can. What it would require is funding and,
sort of, willingness to go there.
The Chairman. Okay.
Dr. Sant. The next thing that we'd really need is we need
the creation of markets, and I think this is where the
government can play a really significant role.
The Chairman. Okay.
Dr. Sant. We need ``Buy Clean'' purchasing mandates to
really come about.
The third thing that we need is we need permitting, and we
need permitting not simply for sequestration but also for
utilization. And if we can couple this with the right kinds of
incentives, particularly tax credits and direct payments where
we couple, as an example, carbon reduction goals with energy
efficiency improvements or production efficiency improvements,
there's much higher incentive to actually make a difference.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Doctor. Mr. Atkins.
Mr. Atkins. Sure, Senator. I think if you're going to
approach this problem with that kind of a timeframe, you almost
have to look at this like a Manhattan Project.
The Chairman. Correct.
Mr. Atkins. Where you're going to devote a lot of resources
from the federal and state level to try to accomplish something
to really change both the market dynamics and the way a lot of
things that we now take for granted are done differently, one
of which, of course, that I focus on, of course, is coal. So if
we could have a dramatically larger shift away from necessarily
using coal for power production and use it for a non-
greenhouse-producing function such as products, that would have
a dramatically positive effect. And I think a number of the
items talked about from both tax policy as well as funding for
research are important components.
The Chairman. But I like that challenge. With that being
announced today, we want to make sure that we are part of the
solution, not an obstacle. And those of us who come from fossil
states know, if the Federal Government is serious about this,
they have to put their money where their mouth is.
I would like for all of you all to be thinking about this
as quickly as possible and get a report back to this Committee
on what it would take and the sort of investments that will be
needed and the practicality of this being done by 2030. That
would be very helpful to us. Okay?
With that, I am going to turn it over to Senator Barrasso.
Senator Barrasso. Well, thanks so much, Mr. Chairman, and
thank you for your ongoing leadership and interest in all of
this.
Mr. Begger, one of the hallmarks of American ingenuity is
our freedom to innovate. Do you agree that innovation is a much
better way to address climate change than regulation and
taxation, in effect, that the United States is only, at this
point, producing about 15 percent of the global emissions and
India and China are producing--their numbers continue to go up
even though our emissions have been, over the last decade,
decidedly down?
Mr. Begger. Ranking Member Barrasso, I think you're
absolutely right. I think if you can innovate and find market
solutions that people rapidly adopt and take, you're going to
find the process moves a lot faster than the stick of
regulation where you have to try to fit that round peg into
that square hole.
Senator Barrasso. Mr. Atkins, you know, your National Coal
Council report discusses the cost advantage of coal-derived
carbon over existing petrochemical feedstocks. With supply
chains for petrochemical feedstocks pretty well established in
the United States and around the world, how can we develop
robust supply chains for coal-derived carbon here at home?
Mr. Atkins. Thank you, Senator.
Well, as I pointed out, there is really a dramatic cost
advantage to coal. So there's the same amount of carbon
basically in a ton of coal as there is in a ton of petroleum,
except a ton of coal in Wyoming goes for $12 and a ton of
petroleum goes for about $400. So you start right there with a
distinct advantage.
For the United States, we basically have the entire value
chain and supply chain within our grasp. We have the resources.
We have the talent. We have the mining talent. We have the
technology talent. We have transportation and logistical
advantages in coal-producing areas. If we can take advantage of
those, that gives us a great deal of a head start toward trying
to get those goals.
Senator Barrasso. And then for all of you, and might be
able to start with you, Jason, and then work our way all the
way through.
In recent years, financial institutions have considered
something called non-financial factors, including
environmental, social and governance, when making investment
decisions. Do each of you believe that financial institutions
should consider carbon utilization technologies to be
specifically compliant with these environmental, social and
governance considerations?
Mr. Begger. Ranking Member Barrasso, absolutely. You know,
if the goal is carbon reduction it shouldn't matter the flavor
of carbon reduction and should be applicable.
Senator Barrasso. Dr. Sant.
Dr. Sant. I agree. I think it's extremely important that we
factor financial considerations into carbon reduction because
if we think about the fact that, you know, we want to be able
to decarbonize, we need technological pathways. And if those
imply a cost, they also imply a cost not only to companies, but
also the financiers that finance companies.
Senator Barrasso. Mr. Atkins.
Mr. Atkins. Yes, Senator.
Well, I spent a lot of time working with the financial
community and I would agree with you. They should follow those
and if they follow the science and the facts, they both would
say that every molecule of carbon that is put into carbon
product, is one that is not put in the air. So I would totally
agree with that.
Senator Barrasso. And Dr. Anderson.
Dr. Anderson. I would concur. I certainly agree that what
we're trying to tackle is the emission challenge and we need to
have all the levers at our disposal.
Senator Barrasso. Mr. Atkins, using carbon and carbon
dioxide as a feedstock in products, I think it is going to draw
a lot of interest from consumers for environmental reasons. Yet
these products really need to perform in a way that they could
be priced competitively with existing products in the market.
It is something that Senators Murkowski, Manchin, Cantwell,
Whitehouse and I saw when we discussed these earlier research
projects being done. How do products made from coal-derived
carbon compare with existing products in the market?
Mr. Atkins. Well, first of all, they are both cheaper. They
are qualitatively better and, in many cases, they're stronger.
As I mentioned, you know, coal enjoys a dramatic cost benefit
over petroleum. So that starts the ball rolling, if you will.
But when you get into some of the specific product lines,
there's dramatic qualitative differences that improve the use
of coal over petroleum in a number of these products.
Senator Barrasso. And then, finally, for Mr. Begger. Coal
communities in Wyoming, West Virginia, and other states have
powered this nation for decades. The demand for thermal coal in
the United States has been in decline, maybe for the
foreseeable future. To what extent can coal-to-products
manufacturing offset the economic and job losses in coal
communities?
Mr. Begger. Senator Barrasso, I think for a lot of those
communities it's about keeping up volume, you know, a community
that's built on a 300 million ton per year sort of economy or a
community that has a million ton per year mine, what can you do
to do things at volume? And so, these products and projects and
things that we do, I think we need to think about that to
ensure that you saw the number of jobs and service
organizations or companies and everything supporting that
industry. So there are applications and opportunities, but we
also need to think about what the number of people that it
would take to carry out those new industries.
Senator Barrasso. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
Now we will go to Senator Heinrich.
Senator Heinrich. Thank you, Chairman.
I want to talk a little bit about the declining cost curves
and one of the things I have learned--having grown up in a
utility family, my dad was a IBEW lineman at a time when all of
our generation was coming from coal and hydro--is that not all
technologies decline in cost over time. And if you look at a
coal-fired power plant, a thermal plant, or if you look at a
nuclear reactor, because they have high labor costs, they have
high permitting costs, they have a lot of uncertainty in their
construction, oftentimes, but they tend not to decline over
time. That is one of the reasons why we have struggled keeping
our nuclear fleet going even though it is firm, carbon-free
power.
So what I want to get at is like how do we, how do we, why
should we believe that we can push the cost of carbon capture
and sequestration down when many of these projects have more in
common with a thermal plant or a nuclear reactor than they do
with an iPhone or solar panel where you have clear
manufacturing-based cost declines?
Mr. Begger, you look like you want to jump on that.
Mr. Begger. Senator, I think that's why we need to have a
suite of technology options available. I think when we think
post-combustion carbon capture, the ones that come to mind are,
you know, Petra Nova, Boundary Dam, which actually employ
solvent-based liquid. And there's actually a pretty
significant, almost chemical plant that you build alongside
that to, you know, to conduct the heat reaction and capture and
do all those things, but there are other types of carbon
capture technologies out there. For example, we have a membrane
technology, just think reverse osmosis water. I mean, we, it
can capture about 75 to 80 percent of the CO2 by
utilizing a membrane.
Senator Heinrich. And would you describe that as more of a
distributed technology than a big centralized piece of
technology like, say, you know, the Kemper County facility that
failed after so many years of cost overruns and construction
delays?
Mr. Begger. The promise of something like a membrane
technology is it can be modular.
Senator Heinrich. Yes.
Mr. Begger. So, you know, you just add on more modules as
you need.
Senator Heinrich. That is actually one of the reasons why I
am optimistic about direct air capture is because it is also a
modular technology. It does not have to be centralized.
And so, Dr. Anderson, I wanted to ask you if you could
speak a little bit about the role that NETL's planned Direct
Air Capture Center can play in pushing this forward as well.
Dr. Anderson. Well, thank you, Senator Heinrich and if I
might take the real quick time. We have also shown some
considerable cost decreases over the last few years in carbon
capture from point sources so moving to second generation
technologies beyond the aqueous and mean solutions that Mr.
Begger was speaking to. We've driven that cost down into the
40s when it started in the 70s. And so, we, we're seeing those
cost declines and seeing some serious promise.
With regard to direct air capture, there are segments of
the economy that are extremely hard to decarbonize. And so,
when we get to those segments of the economy in the industry
and furnaces in folks' homes and we need negative emissions
technologies like that----
Senator Heinrich. I am going to stop--I would agree with
you when it comes to decarbonizing industrial processes. In
most cases, furnaces in people's homes can be replaced with
electric heat pumps and that is the most efficient way to get
to zero carbon is to power those electric heat pumps with clean
electricity.
But Dr. Sant, before I run out of time here, I wanted to
give you a chance to talk a little bit about how you would
structure a ``Buy Clean'' incentive for the U.S. Government to
procure, for example, low-carbon concrete.
Dr. Sant. Senator Heinrich, really the important thing I
think we want to fully focus on when we think about ``Buy
Clean'' is we want to think about cost and we want to think
about carbon intensity. Historically, with construction
projects we've thought about everything based on the lowest bid
and the lowest bid is an insufficient basis of procurement. We
need to think about both cost and carbon intensity on an equal
basis and potentially even on somewhat of a favored basis
toward carbon intensity to create the market for low-carbon
products.
I think, you know, of course, all of this imagines that
you've got exactly the same engineering requirements that all
products fulfill, but you use cost and carbon intensity as two
levers that you can essentially adjust in making purchasing
decisions. I think states like California are already moving
forward with ideas of this sort, and you're starting to see
that there's a response. Markets are starting to be thoughtful
and most importantly, consumers, even at an individual level
are starting to be thoughtful and I think that that's really
how you capitalize change.
Senator Heinrich. I'd be very interested in working with
you on something of that sort. I do believe that, you know, the
power of the Federal Government through procurement to really
be a huge entry into transitioning these technologies to a much
lower cost, to a much wider application, is part of how we
solve some of these challenging problems.
Dr. Sant. So I agree 100 percent and this is important not
simply to think about how we think about a bid process, but
it's important for how we catalyze production capacity and
market demand. And you know, both of these, all of these things
have to work hand in hand because you need policy and
manufacturing capacity and really consumer response to all sync
together. And so, thinking about really good policy around it
is important and we're happy to help.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
Now we have Senator Lankford.
Senator Lankford. Well, thank you very much for your
engagement in your research on all these issues. I do want to
be able to dig a little bit deeper on how far we are on some of
this research. This really is a question for Mr. Atkins and Mr.
Anderson.
Tell me how close are we to being economical on trying to
get rare earth minerals out of coal? Where are we? I know we
are working on it a lot. We have talked about it a lot. Tell
me, how close are we to making it economical?
Dr. Anderson. So, Randy, would you want to start or me?
Mr. Atkins. Sure. We are now working with NETL's offices in
Albany, Oregon, on assessment of rare earths and trying to
essentially map out in the United States where rare earth
deposits might be found. And the second part of the question,
of course, is once we find them, how do we economically process
them? I would say that in terms of finding them, we're much
further advanced than we are, necessarily, in how we process
them. And I think that's where, probably, a lot of research
needs to be devoted.
And Brian, probably, since NETL is at the forefront at a
lot of rare earth research efforts, I'll let you speak to the
processing side.
Dr. Anderson. Sure. Well, Senator Lankford, I can get you
the exact numbers and where our projections are today. We have
a number of projects from different types of feedstocks,
including raw coal, but also from some environmental
remediation projects like acid mine drainage sludge which
present a little barrier to the concentration of rare earths.
We are not to the point of economical competitiveness with the
international rare earth markets, particularly dominated by the
rare earth deposits in China, but we are driving the cost down
as we scale up the processes from a number of different
feedstocks. I can get you the exact numbers.
Senator Lankford. That would be great.
Senator Lankford. I am not going to try to hold you to an
exact number because no one knows the future but God, but give
me a good guess on are we talking five decades, three decades,
one decade, five years before we start getting to that point
based on current trends?
Dr. Anderson. Based on the current trends, I think we're
pointing toward a decade, but there's also some national
security and implications of supply chain, supply chain
variety. So, they'll have some domestic supply chains that it
might be worth paying a slight premium to have domestic sources
of rare earths and critical minerals.
Senator Lankford. Well, it is exceptionally beneficial to
us to not be dependent on a communist nation like China for our
rare earths, all of our development. Our rare earths and
critical minerals are used in a lot of places and we are
exceptionally vulnerable at this point and dependent on a
communist nation for our basic supply chain, I think, is a
terrible idea. And so, developing domestic sources, I think, is
exceptionally important and this is an area that we need to
continue to be able to engage in.
I do want to ask Mr. Anderson the next follow-up question
on commercialization. There has been a lot of conversation
about continuing to be able to use carbon in road building and
a lot of other projects, building materials. Some of those are
in current use and they are common. Some of those are
exploratory and we may have a while on. So give me something
that is aspirational at this point that is being discussed, but
is not ready for prime time yet and give me something that is
currently being used and is economical.
Dr. Anderson. So one that's extremely promising is our
coal-to-graphene materials for additives in cement. We've been
able to drive down the cost of producing graphene by over
10,000 compared to the current value which would enable high
volumes of graphene to be produced and put into cements that
strengthen cement for transportation applications. That's one
that's aspirational but we see a real pathway into the future.
Some of the other areas that are being at the edge of being put
in the market that are some of our work in building materials,
as represented by some of the folks here today, as well as
Semplastics. I mentioned the Semplastics and X-MAT project that
has built a facility in southern West Virginia to make roofing
tiles that are a replacement for existing ceramic roofing tiles
that is on the verge of commercialization and scale-up at the
commercial scale with some tremendous success.
Senator Lankford. Great----
Mr. Atkins. I might add on top of Brian's comment is that
carbon fiber is another area that, I think, is going to be very
critical which is close to something that we might be able to
have into the market within the next two to five years.
Senator Lankford. Great.
Mr. Atkins. And it has a dramatic impact on infrastructure.
It has a dramatic impact on lightweighting of vehicles, on
planes, on military and other strategic interests and that is
an area that we've been working on with Oak Ridge National Labs
which is something that we feel should be promoted by the
government.
Senator Lankford. That's helpful.
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for the time.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
And now we have Senator Cortez Masto by WebEx.
Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and the
Ranking Member.
Dr. Anderson, let me start with you. In your written
testimony you stated that the emergent field of CO2
utilization encompasses many possible products and applications
and then you went on to list geothermal energy as a
complementary technology, cutting-edge research in carbon
utilization. As you may be aware, Nevada is one of the largest
geothermal energy producers in the country and I believe we
have significant untapped potential. Can you please expand on
this and talk more about the ways in which both DOE and NETL
are pairing carbon utilization and geothermal technologies?
Dr. Anderson. So our early research in the national labs
back in the 1980s were identifying CO2 as a
potential geothermal fluid for use in engineered geothermal
systems in the subsurface. It has some advantages over water
because of its ability to carry energy and have lower viscosity
and see it in geothermal applications. It is one that is still
an active research area. There has been limited, limited field
testing of using CO2 as a geothermal fluid but the
Geothermal Technologies Office and Energy Efficiency and
Renewable Energy has continued to do some work on this. And in
fact, in my own history as a researcher, I personally have done
research in CO2 as a geothermal fluid and it does
have a tremendous potential to be coupled with regenerated, the
mean regeneration facilities and the need for heat, to use
CO2 in the subsurface, produce geothermal energy and
subsequently decarbonized through utilization.
Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you, Dr. Anderson.
Let me ask Dr. Sant, in your written testimony you called
for the need to stage support and incentivize deployment
CO2 utilization technologies in order to help
industry transition and reduce CO2 emissions. So as
the U.S. invests in carbon dioxide technology, how should we be
looking ahead to ensure that domestic manufacturing and
workforce training is keeping pace with the innovation?
Dr. Sant. Thank you, Senator, for the question.
So, really, I think there's two or three things that we
need to think about. You know, historically we've had a big
focus on funding research and technology development to what,
I'd say, is lower TRL [technology readiness level], so to
speak, and we need to really look at pushing up the TRL levels
that we offer support to. So I think, you know, when we think
about manufacturing, we need to think about really the funding
of full-scale commercial plants which allow us to do two
things. Number one, they allow corporations to gain experience
with operating and managing these new facilities and new
processes which are different from what they've historically
done. I think what goes hand in hand with that is really the
retraining of a workforce because, you know, you need a
workforce that's going to do things differently that have been
done so far.
All of this can really only come about if we really funding
the construction of these facilities and really putting them in
place fast enough because without having the early-stage
support that's needed to really have full commercial
deployments, we're not going to scale up fast enough. And I
think this kind of, sort of, operational familiarity,
experiential familiarity, really comes from the government
stepping in to offer early-stage support because as it builds
experience, or builds experience not only in the production but
also in the products and these things will go hand in hand with
worker retraining and, sort of, broader technology diffusion
into the market.
Senator Cortez Masto. Then when you talk about, because I
do believe there is an importance here with the public-private
partnership that is essential in helping deploy these
technologies and ensuring that the industry is trained and
prepared. So that is a key component of design. I am assuming,
as you are thinking about this, when you talked about
government, kind of, stepping in, in the initial stages and
incentivizing, but there is also this reliance on that public-
private partnership. Is that correct?
Dr. Sant. Absolutely. All of these things have to follow a
public-private partnership and it has to go up and down the
value chain, right? So we have to think about manufacturing,
but we also have to think about the creation of these products
because having facilities that produce products that don't get
used is not useful. And this is really where, you know, being
able to stage, sort of, a ``Buy Clean'' type of idea where you
really have these facilities that are producing products that
go fulfill a ``Buy Clean'' agenda, sort of, gives you complete
coverage of the supply chain and the value chain. I think being
able to sync these things together, obviously, requires
government support which is the public part and bringing
private corporations to a point that they're able to, sort of,
really leverage that support in the best way to really create a
market for products and services which are of a low carbon
nature.
Senator Cortez Masto. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
And next, we have Senator Cassidy by WebEx.
Is Senator Cassidy on?
If not, we will have Senator Murkowski.
Senator Murkowski. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
You know I love these hearings.
The Chairman. I knew you were ready.
Senator Murkowski. But to be able to talk about the
technologies and how we can utilize carbon. You know, for so
long, we talked about carbon sequestration. Okay, that's good.
We can put it back in the ground, but to be able to utilize it,
to manage it, and to make good stuff out of it, is exciting. We
had that great trip when we did our Arctic CODEL and had an
opportunity to go to the University of Aberdeen and to see
there what they were doing with the various products, but just
again, better understanding what we can do with utilization.
I am going to start my questions off with you, Dr.
Anderson, because I want to talk about something that I don't
think has been discussed here yet this morning and that is the
potential that we have for utilizing, whether it is algae or
kelp or seaweed, but the focus on what the oceans can provide.
I have legislation that I have introduced with Senator
Whitehouse, the Blue Carbon for Our Planet Act, which kind of
focuses on what is naturally captured and stored in the oceans
or what could potentially be utilized on our deep seabed
floors. But more interesting to me is to be able to look at
something like kelp, be able to use that as that carbon sink,
if you will, and still have a market for a pretty extraordinary
product.
So I am interested in this kind of innovation in seaweed
aquaculture. We are certainly seeing it in Alaska. The Center
for Climate and Energy Solutions estimates that by 2030 algae-
based products will be a $320 billion industry. And one of the
advantages that I understand is that it does not require high-
purity carbon dioxide feedback. It can be processed, converted
to different products, everything from food for livestock and
aquaculture feed to food products, chemicals, et cetera. So the
question to you this morning, Dr. Anderson, and with all that
you have been doing at NETL, do you think that, I mean, am I
just dreaming on this, that this is a great opportunity for us
but that, with the potential for algae and other seaweed-type
matter, that we can economically cultivate and commercially
scale to, whether it is fuel different alternatives, but create
other valuable products? So your comments on what we might be
able to do with these materials that are part of our ocean
systems.
Dr. Anderson. Senator, over the past few years or even,
really, the past decade, we have had a number of projects
specifically along using algae and using aquaculture for the
capture of CO2. It's showing some promise, but also
some challenges, as you were alluding to in terms of economics,
the economics of capture and pushing the CO2 through
the aqueous system and the growth, the growth profiles of the
algae. However, a project at the University of Kentucky is
showing some significant progress on making higher value and
it's not vitamins, but higher value additives for animal feeds
out of the algae process as opposed to moving it into the fuel
sector. So there's still a considerable amount of work, and the
work we're doing at NETL as well as NREL on the using algae for
CO2 capture.
In addition, we have with NREL and ExxonMobil a three-prong
collaboration where the attempt is to use the algae and bio-,
aquaculture-based processes with both Exxon's expertise and
scale-up. And so, it's in the early stages, but again, showing
some promise, but no major economic drivers that I see at the
moment.
Senator Murkowski. Okay, well, keep working on it. We are
working on our end as well.
You know, it is interesting because this morning I am
joining a large group of members--I think, Senator Manchin, you
are part of this--but the growing climate solutions legislation
that is being introduced today. So there is a lot going on, I
think, where we are looking at these new and innovative ways,
whether it is producing building materials or whether it is
food for livestock, but it is a good point for us to be at. So
how we take that next step, lots of good work going on.
Dr. Sant, I want to congratulate you and your team for
winning the Carbon XPRIZE, pretty cool. I guess the question
that I would have of you, and I will direct this to you, Dr.
Sant, is should the Department of Energy's Building
Technologies Office be doing more to help, whether it is
develop, test or certify the carbonate material? Should other
organizations, like ASTM International, be part of this? You
know, as we try to figure out how we go from getting the great
ideas to real commercialization here, should our agencies be
doing more in that regard, other organizations as well?
Dr. Sant. So, Senator Murkowski, thanks very much for the
question.
There's really maybe a couple of different comments to
make. Number one, I think it's important involving the
Department of Transportation because they are over, above and
beyond largest consumers of concrete in the United States.
Being able to couple this with the Department of Defense for,
again, obvious reasons makes sense because, again, the biggest
users. I think if we can tie this in with an agency like NIST,
as an example, you know, National Institute of Standards and
Technology, I think it gives us a unified way to get, sort of,
the biggest buyers and, obviously, the Standards agency and get
them to all work together. And eventually, flow all of that
down into ASTM. The Building Technologies Office has
historically not looked at primary construction materials, at
least as I'm aware. They've looked to things like building
envelopes and energy efficiency, but not really of primary
construction materials. I think really starting out with the
transportation agencies is a good place to start because
anything that's accepted by a transportation agency is
typically accepted downstream into the construction sector.
That said, however, I think it's important to really think
about setting unified standards. And you know, I think creating
databases is really something which I'll keep going back to
because there are two parts to this. One part is really the
engineering performance. The second part is really the life
cycle or environmental intensity of production and use. And we
need to really harmonize both of these things together which is
something that we've not done.
Maybe just as an aside, you know, going back to your
earlier question as we know the oceans are the biggest sink of
CO2 in the world and beyond simply thinking about
kelp, as an example, you know, there might be some interesting
opportunities based on work that we've been doing over the last
several years where there are interesting adjacencies where you
can achieve carbon dioxide removal but also produce things like
hydrogen in the process. And hydrogen, as you know, is a clean
fuel, so there might be opportunities to really couple this
even beyond just what I'd said is biological farms to maybe
even energy sources.
Senator Murkowski. Very encouraging.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate it and I appreciate
not only the witnesses being here today but what you are doing
to contribute and push out in these great areas of innovation.
So thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
And now we have Senator King by WebEx.
Senator King. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Sorry to have been late to this hearing. I was at an Armed
Services hearing talking about entirely different, but
nonetheless very serious, issues. What I am most interested in
is timing. We are in a race and we are in a race that we are
losing right now. Let's put aside utilization of the carbon
that we remove and I want to focus on carbon capture in the
burning of fossil fuels and carbon removal from the atmosphere
which is ultimately going to be necessary if we are going to
win this race because of the persistence of carbon in the
atmosphere.
Dr. Anderson, give me some hard numbers. What are we
talking about for when we have a carbon capture technology
that, for example, would be cost-effective on any fossil fuel
plant? And the second question is, how far away are we from
being able to actually remove carbon from the atmosphere, not
capture it in the process of burning fossil fuels?
Dr. Anderson. Well, Senator King, thank you so much for
that question.
Right now, given 45Q and a real concrete price point and
price incentive which is a bit analogous to the ITC or PTC tax
credits on solar and wind, there's tremendous commercial
interest today given the technologies where we are today. The
driving down the price curve which I mentioned earlier, I do
believe there is a potential for continued decreases in the
cost curve requires getting it out into the commercial scale
and the commercial sector needs those concrete financeable
incentives to capture carbon. And so, 45Q is a step. The
follow-on steps would be the price of carbon and those price
signals that folks can go to the bank.
And so, in short, I'd say it's as fast as we can construct
those projects that are applying to 45Q today and then as they
are deployed into the market within the next ten years, we will
be driving the cost of capture down and I think we will achieve
a $30 price.
As far as direct air capture, it's much higher up on the
price curve. And so, when it comes to the incent--the price
paid for carbon whether it's a 45Q tax credit, we have a longer
way to go to drive down the cost of direct air capture.
Senator King. Do you think that, when we are talking about
capture, that by the time that capture technology is cost-
effective, we will be out of the fossil fuel, at least in the
electric generating business? The President today is announcing
a goal of 50 percent reduction in nine years. So it may be that
the technology becomes available at a time when there are no
more fossil fuel plants. Is that a possibility or will there
always be fossil fuel plants?
Dr. Anderson. I believe because of resiliency and
reliability issues and also considering the deployment curves
of the non-fossil emitting electricity generation resources, as
we move to higher and higher levels of deployment, we need on
demand, firm power generating assets. And so, those assets will
likely be fossil energy with carbon capture moving into the
future. And we are in the midst of a lot of natural gas plants
being built today and natural gas with carbon capture has a
great potential of providing that firm power in a carbon-free
basis with carbon capture.
Senator King. I fully understand the importance of backup
power and to solve the intermittency problem, but again, we are
talking about a five- to ten-year timeframe we may see dramatic
developments in storage or in a new generation of nuclear power
which could provide that backup, but it is certainly a dynamic
market. I am encouraged about the timeline on carbon capture. I
am discouraged about the timeline on carbon removal because in
the long run, that is going to be necessary. We could stop all
carbon in the atmosphere tomorrow, and we would still have a
problem. As you know, we are pretty much beyond the tipping
point.
Dr. Anderson. Yes, and so that will, you know, perhaps we
need different levels of the carbon incentive to make it
economical for direct air capture or other carbon removal
technologies.
Senator King. Do you believe that a price on carbon in some
way has--some kind of good carbon price and dividend would be
an important policy initiative?
Dr. Anderson. Well, if we are to decarbonize our economy,
we do need price signals that the private sector can run to the
bank and are bankable in order to decarbonize. In terms of the
policy mechanisms, there are a number of ways to get to the end
goal, but some signal on carbon, itself, is necessary.
Senator King. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
Now, Senator Daines.
Senator Daines. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Last Congress, we passed our bipartisan EFFECT Act. It
increases investment and, importantly, commercialization of
carbon capture technology. And while the U.S. continues to lead
in carbon capture research, as well as development, we have not
yet brought the technology to scale in the cost necessary for
wide adoption. In the EFFECT Act, we set up a program for
large-scale pilot projects at an existing coal or natural gas
power plant. In fact, I believe that Montana is a great fit for
one of these pilot projects. I have five letters of support
from the community and businesses around the Colstrip Power
Plant asking for a project to be located there to help keep and
to grow the jobs in that area.
Dr. Anderson, as DOE prepares to implement the authorities
in the EFFECT Act, what will DOE be looking for in a pilot
project and how can we ensure that the voice of Montanans are
heard in that process?
Dr. Anderson. Well, Senator Daines, thank you for that
question.
As we move forward, the deployment of carbon capture and
sequestration technologies under our carbon capture program, we
have a number of projects under CarbonSAFE which has been
identifying the subsurface resources available for
sequestration. We're moving into a FEED stage, Front-End
Engineering Design, which would do the full-scale design of the
integrated carbon capture and sequestration process for a
number of our CarbonSAFE FEED study projects and what we're
looking for is that fully encompassed design and the
implementation plan. Then when it comes to deployment in large-
scale and being able to scale up to the commercial scale,
again, I do believe that a lot rides on the signals like 45Q
that would provide financing for the private sector to pursue
carbon capture projects.
Senator Daines. Thank you, and I appreciate your thoughts
on that. I think that would be helpful. We have, we think, a
wonderful place for it, of course. It is a large operation,
transmission lines that take care of moving energy across the
Northwest, so we would like to be considered for sure.
While it is important to promote federal investment in
research and development, we also need to ensure companies have
the tools in place to create and build those jobs. That is
where Chairman Manchin's and my bipartisan American Jobs in
Energy Manufacturing Act comes in. Our bill incentivizes
companies to build the next generation of energy manufacturing
in the U.S. and specifically in rural areas like Montana, and
updating, of course, the tax credits. This includes clean
technologies like carbon capture and utilization, renewable
fuels and coal-to-products.
Mr. Atkins, how can companies like yours leverage tax
credits like the one in our bill to create jobs in rural
communities? I know they are very important to Senator Manchin
and myself.
Mr. Atkins. So I think tax credits are an integral part of
any private financing. We look at trying to basically look at
creating an equality with the 45Q credit so that perhaps there
might be credits for not only just not using carbon emissions,
but also capturing it. We've been working with NETL on some
rather innovative technologies where we can take forest
carbons, taking basically a gram of coal and we can create
3,000 square meters worth of porous surface. That can be used
to capture carbon and that's the type of thing that we want to
get private incentives from the government to be able to put
into manufacturing in the private areas.
Senator Daines. Yes, I think that is what sometimes is
forgotten. It is a very capital-intensive process----
Mr. Atkins. Indeed.
Senator Daines. ----with long-term payouts. It is something
that----
Mr. Atkins. And in many of these technologies there's
what's called the manufacturing valley of death where you
essentially, you need, you know, vast sums of private capital
to create manufacturing facilities to meet product ends which,
in many cases, are incented by the government.
Senator Daines. Yes, and I think then also it is the
certainty that is needed for these long-term capital
investments----
Mr. Atkins. Indeed.
Senator Daines. ----that would be most helpful. Thank you,
Mr. Chairman. I yield back my time.
The Chairman. Thank you, Senator.
And now we have Senator Cantwell.
Senator Cantwell. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank
you to you and the Ranking Member Barrasso for holding this
hearing. Happy Earth Day to both of you.
The Chairman. Happy Earth Day.
Senator Cantwell. I certainly appreciate that there are
many hearings across the spectrum today talking about R&D
investments. Many of you know we are working on the Endless
Frontier Act in the Commerce Committee, and we certainly want
to get technology innovation and commercialization right. I
think this particular area we are discussing today about clean
energy markets and more R&D into carbon sequestration and
utilization is certainly worth more investment. So I certainly
appreciate that and certainly appreciate the role of DOE in
making sure that it is recognized in the future and making sure
that we continue to empower it on these areas.
I wanted to ask two questions. Mr. Begger, what do you
think that we have learned from what you have been able to do
in Wyoming as it relates to the ITC, Integrated Test Center,
and activities like the XPRIZE--what do you think we should
apply from that to the future public-private partnerships? I am
also curious, to any of the witnesses, I think of our public
lands, obviously, as a way to sequester some amount of domestic
carbon emissions and what else should we be doing in that
particular area? The National Academy of Sciences estimated the
U.S. can store an additional 500 million metric tons of
CO2 per year through a mix of carbon-enhancing
practices on crop land, grasslands and forest lands. And so, I
think this is something that we also should be considering.
Mr. Begger, if you want to start and then anybody who wants
to answer the second part?
Mr. Begger. Senator, I think we've learned a lot of really
important lessons at the ITC, and we feel like we bridge that
valley of death role that was just mentioned. And NETL and
Department of Energy has a great graphic that, sort of, shows
this timeline of technology development and there was this
valley of death between the small-scale things coming out of
laboratories and universities versus things at a 10- to 20-
megawatt scale which is 200 to 400 ton per day of capture--
facilities that industry needs to see in order to feel
comfortable that it's scaling up. And I think that's the
biggest thing with the success of the Integrated Test Centers,
our utilities, and the National Rural Electric Cooperatives
Association, is they're able to give us nudges, indications, as
to hey, as ultimate consumers of this technology, these are
things that make sense to us and fit in the economics of how we
run our business. So I think that's important.
I think in other areas looking at environmental permitting,
everything that goes along with it, as a research facility,
each and every one of our tenants still need to comply with the
Clean Air Act and receive permits and do things. So looking at
things like a blanket permit waiver from the EPA for test
facilities would be really helpful for teams like CarbonBuilt
that came in that are academics that really have never dealt
with permitting and things at that level of sophistication
before that we had to help them with. And last, when you think
about public lands, you're going to trigger NEPA, every step of
the way, and I look at, we have a----
Senator Cantwell. I don't know, why would you trigger NEPA?
What I am saying, let's make sure we preserve big forests like
the Tongass or other areas that don't de-carbon and don't take
away from that, so----
Mr. Begger. Senator, I'm speaking a little bit more broadly
with industrial uses, like you're moving CO2 from,
say, places that are sources in the Midwest to the West where
you have really good geology for geologic sequestration, so----
Senator Cantwell. I am talking about just understanding our
current natural benefits. Anybody else on that point?
Dr. Anderson. So Senator, if I could----
Mr. Atkins. One way to also look at this might be to
consider, not just the public side, but the private side
because if we can incent private industry to use other means
of, sort of, separating the C and the O2, we've
proven that there are uses for the carbon. So I think there's
more than one way to skin a cat and I think to the extent that
Congress can help incent research and development from the
private side toward this, I think, that might be very useful.
Senator Cantwell. We heard another voice somewhere.
Dr. Sant. Senator Cantwell, I'm happy to say something
about the XPRIZE. I think, you know, one of the things that we
really liked about the competition and sort of just thinking
about the general idea of innovation, being able to work toward
a defined goal is always really good, but I think what's really
required as we think about innovation is an acceptance for
failure, right? I think we've gotten overly focused on, sort
of, just, being, desiring success, but in innovation, success
is never assured. And I think being able to accept failure and
being able to build programs that, sort of, reward failure as a
step in the learning process is, I think, something that we
fundamentally need to think of as we approach large-scale R&D,
especially the kinds of crash R&D programs that are likely to
be needed to make a difference in a decade.
Senator Cantwell. Mr. Chairman, if I could, on that point
because this is so important to this broad debate that we are
having today. I think there is a really big philosophical
question that we have to address here. To me, if you are
talking about the private sector having its experiments and
having failures, I am all good with it, okay? If you are
talking about us doing basic research and having failures, I am
all good with that too. But if you are talking about taxpayer
money and you are picking certain technologies as winners and
losers and then finding out, or maybe even building actual test
bed manufacturing facilities and you basically lose--I'm not
sure taxpayers are good with that.
So I think that we want to proceed on some of these
questions because as Mr. Begger said, the test bed in Wyoming
did give us some answers and we are at that stage where we want
to take tech transfer and make it more robust, but I guarantee,
the minute we have a Solyndra or something like that, the
public, the taxpayer dollar isn't going to be down with, you
know, we failed. So I think we just have to get some context
here. I am just trying to understand. What context are we going
to have to the government funding actual, what I would call,
translational science and having failures? I just do not know
how to categorize that because now we are dealing with taxpayer
money, not investor money. And I do think my constituents who
are a very, very big innovation economy, I would say there are
hundreds of thousands of people who invest in these companies
in my state. They are very sophisticated, you know, they
definitely understand risk. But I don't know that they
understand that that risk could be taken with taxpayer dollars.
So if anybody can help me out on that, I would love to hear
an answer because we are in the midst of trying to do this
right now with this big EFA bill.
Dr. Sant. You know, I don't have all the answers. This is
definitely an important point that we raise and, of course, we
want to be good stewards of taxpayer money, for sure. But I
think the reality is that, you know, not all questions can be
answered until we get to full commercial scale. And I think
that's just, sort of, the nature of the beast. I think between
a combination of being able to deal with those technologies
sequentially as we come up with TRL is something that we need
to do, being able to develop really robust vetting processes
that'll give us a line of sight, understanding if something
might fail is an important thing to do.
But I think there's also a market aspect to it because, you
know, if you create a market demand on the other side, it's
highly unlikely that you would end up with failure because of
this demand that assured and the supply that's coming online,
that generally leads to a favorable outcome. And so, you know,
I think, I think, I don't disagree that this is, sort of, a
bigger and a broader issue, but we maybe need to think about it
a bit more expansively, as simply just, sort of, a single case
at a time.
Senator Cantwell. Thank you. I know I am way over my time,
Mr. Chairman, but this is such an important timely question and
I do think it is important, particularly in this particular
area too.
Senator Barrasso [presiding]. Well, thank you so much,
Senator Cantwell, for your continued interest in what we had
talked earlier while you were here, you know, the traveling
that we have done to look at some of these research projects
that were done. And as Dr. Sant, who has actually won the
award, the XPRIZE, where we had looked at the research done
overseas. So thank you.
Senator Cassidy.
Senator Cassidy. Thank you, thank you, all. Just putting
time between hearings so if I ask something that is redundant,
I apologize.
Dr. Anderson or Mr. Begger, my briefing materials spoke
about carbon dioxide from a fluent, for example, or whatever,
being used to create methanol. Another example was being used
to make ethylene. What is the cost basis, do you know, of
making methanol from CO2 as opposed to that which is
made from natural gas? I just say that because that relates to
commercial viability. We want to have a wonderful--we want to
have someplace to make, you know, to do with all this
CO2, some way to use all this CO2 and I
am just curious about that, nothing else but curiosity right
now.
Dr. Anderson. Senator Cassidy, if I might jump in. You
know, certainly because CO2 is thermodynamically
more stable, it is moving back up, back up the oxidation chain.
So it is not more economical to go CO2 to methanol
than it is methane. However, under certain context because of--
if, as we move down the deployment curve of intermittent
renewables, there are times in which we may end up with
curtailment situations under renewables with excess electricity
and in terms of the storage options, there's battery storage
for grid-scale, but there are also thermochemical storage
opportunities. And so, if you couple an intermittent renewable
generation facility with direct air capture, you might have a
source of CO2 that's effectively free and electrons
that are, would otherwise be curtailed that would allow for the
chemical storage.
And so, it's part of the integrated energy systems work
that we have going on at Idaho National Lab and NREL to
understand the full dynamics of those economics which are
simply more complicated than just starting with methane or
starting with CO2.
Senator Cassidy. Now does that suggest that you need
proximity of the generation to the plant which is converting to
direct air capture, for example, or can it just be excess
electrons on the grid? And, just curious, can you have a start
and stop, you know, kind of a rapid gear up? We are going to
start taking your CO2 and turn it to methanol,
knowing that this may be TBD, but what you are saying is very
intriguing to me.
Dr. Anderson. Senator, some is TBD and it certainly doesn't
have to be proximal, but at least with direct air capture you
can move it almost anywhere and you can eliminate line losses
if you do put it proximal to the intermittent resource.
Senator Cassidy. My understanding was that direct air
capture works best in warm, humid environments. Coming from
Louisiana, of course, that perked my ears. But are you
suggesting that we could do just as well in some frigid,
northern place beset by snow and ice?
Dr. Anderson. Well, it might not be as efficient, but there
is certainly a demonstration facility in Iceland in one of the
direct air capture demonstration facilities that's doing pretty
well in Iceland, as well.
Senator Cassidy. The ethylene--I see that there is a
demonstration project with Occidental using CO2 to
make ethylene. Again, is that the same principle that you have
been discussing?
Dr. Anderson. It is effectively the same principle.
CO2 to a syngas with water and then from syngas you
can make almost any of the hydrocarbons.
Senator Cassidy. Just a question of whether or not you have
adequate energy input, whether or not your net carbon profile
is better off with or without it. Fair summary?
Dr. Anderson. Well, absolutely, because you are climbing up
the energy chain going from CO2 to a hydrocarbon.
And so, it requires some excess energy.
Senator Cassidy. Dr. Sant, again, I apologize if someone
has already asked you about this, but I think it is really
interesting, your technology. If you use CO2 to cure
your concrete, how much does that save on your CO2
profile relative to traditional Portland concrete--cement?
Dr. Sant. Senator, we've spent a lot of time looking at
this and, you know, if I give you an example around something
like a typical concrete block, which is one of the products
that we're in the midst of producing, we can reduce the carbon
intensity by between 50 and 70 percent compared to a
traditional concrete. So it's a really, a pretty significant
reduction.
Senator Cassidy. I have been, you know, there are a lot of
advocates for carbon taxes which it seems like if you are going
to have a border adjustment tax or a carbon tax, you would have
to take into account not only the energy inputs but also the
concrete that would be required to build a particular facility,
if you are really going to--as well as the vehicles going back
and forth, all that sort of a thing. So if somebody was going
to build a facility in the U.S. or overseas using your
technology, the logical extension is if you have a border
adjustment tax or a border adjustment credit, is that somehow
this would be amortized over a certain period of time, the
amount of carbon that they, that the constructors saved from
using your technology. Again, I am thinking out loud, but I
suspect you would agree with that?
Dr. Sant. So generally speaking, you know, so, of course, a
border type of adjustment may or may not make sense depending
on whether you're dealing with an import question or not, but I
think the short answer really turns out to be, it really
depends on the price signal on CO2 and whether that
price signal is best valued over an amortized basis or whether
it can be recovered at the front end. If you can recover it at
the front end, I think you want to do it all up front. On the
other hand, you know, if there's a reason to sort of make a bet
on the forward price curve, well then you might choose to
amortize it so you can essentially value it into the future.
Senator Cassidy. All, I appreciate your testimony. I yield
back, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman [presiding]. Thank you, Senator.
Now we will have, Senator Marshall.
Senator Marshall. Well, thank you, Chairman.
My first question is going to be for Mr. Atkins and it has
to do with the tax benefit that, I believe, both the oil and
gas industry and the coal industry benefit from called the
percentage depletion allowance. One of the prerequisites here
is that coal is a very cheap product and there are so many
opportunities for it, and it is my understanding in the
infrastructure bill that is coming before us that we are
considering, that we would lose this percentage depletion
allowance. When I think about tax benefits that the different
energies receive, I think about the oil and gas industry, coal
industry--if it was 1 time, probably the wind energy receives 7
times that, and solar maybe 70 times that, from a benefit from
the Federal Government. And I always preface this by saying,
look, I want to leave this environment cleaner, healthier and
safer than I found it, as do all of us in the room, but I
cannot drive the cost of energy up so much that a working
family can no longer put gas in their car or pay their
electricity bill.
Is that, am I making some reasonable assumptions here when
you think about tax benefits to the different industries that
really coal, this may be the last thing standing that coal
gets?
Mr. Atkins. Yeah. I think, you know, all industries like to
play on an even playing field and I'm afraid, you know, as
we've gone on over time, that playing field keeps changing.
Obviously today, the thumb on the scale is obviously weighted
toward renewables. It's been taken off of any of the fossil
fuels. And I think the way we've tried to approach it,
obviously, we are in favor of all incentives that can be given
for any form of production in this country. I don't care
whether it's wind, solar, coal, fossil fuel. They all create
jobs. They're all critical to our national strategic interests
and they should all be fostered.
What we've tried to do is to, sort of, take away from the
equation, you know, the notion that somehow carbon is bad.
Carbon is not bad. There are issues, obviously, when you
combine a carbon with an oxygen molecule and you have
CO2. And we understand that. So we're trying to
basically move beyond that thesis and really step outside into
something modestly transformational where we say, all right,
let's look at the carbon inside of something that is, today, in
disfavor, frankly, and see if we can turn--I hate to use this
phrase--sort of, a diamond in the rough.
[Laughter.]
So, you know, coal is a--a diamond is basically coal that's
done well under pressure. So essentially, that's what we're
trying to do.
Senator Marshall. Yes, coal gives us a pretty big bang for
the buck when it comes to energy. There is no doubt about that
as well.
I think my next question is for Dr. Anderson. Dr. Anderson,
we are hearing about more technologies here today and taking
carbon and just turning it into some incredible things from a
manufacturing process. And I had the opportunity recently to
sit down with a company, Carbon Solutions-Materia USA out of
Pennsylvania, and they gave me a piece of carbon and then gave
me the fiber that they are able to turn it into and the
graphite as well. I mean, I think it could be transformative.
When we think about the opportunities for high-speed fiber,
making carbon into high-speed fiber, making semi-conductors, my
goodness. Other countries are dominating all these areas and we
have to bring these back to the United States.
So, Dr. Anderson, I guess my question, you know, are you
committed to helping the Department of Energy bring these
technologies to fruition and help Americans out here, bringing
these supply chains back into the United States?
Dr. Anderson. Yes, we are. And in fact, I think that there
is one, one opportunity here that we may not have stated. There
are many communities across the country, coal and power plant
communities that are, have been impacted and will become even
more impacted as we move forward in the energy transition. And
as we create opportunities for adding value from the coal
resource that are in these coal communities, it turns out that
many of the supply chains are much more efficient if the
processing facilities are moved closer to the mine mouth.
And so, in fact, when we look at the replacement of jobs
that Mr. Begger was alluding to earlier, there is an
opportunity to add value, like you were mentioning these high-
value products, by bringing the supply chain back closer to the
mine mouth and creating additional jobs in addition to
replacement of tonnage, as was spoken of earlier.
Senator Marshall. Is there anything more specific that you
can describe what you see the role the Department of Energy is
in bringing this to the real world?
Dr. Anderson. Well, and so, it is as one, an applied
laboratory and the government-owned, government-operated
laboratory within the DOE that manages the program across
fossil energy, energy efficiency and renewable energy and CESER
and OE. It is our job to make sure that these technologies find
their way into market and reduce risk and have the appropriate
technology transfer pathways for all the technologies we work
on, including coal-to-products and the other carbon products
and CO2 utilization. So it is firmly within our
mission to try to get these technologies into the hands of the
folks who will put it into a commercial practice.
Senator Marshall. Thank you and I yield back.
Senator Barrasso [presiding]. Thank you, Senator Marshall.
Senator Hoeven.
Senator Hoeven. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Anderson, how important is collaboration between NETL
and its partners like the Energy and Environmental Research
Center, EERC, at the University of North Dakota in terms of
developing the technologies that are going to help us crack the
code on carbon capture and sequestration? Could you talk a
little bit about the importance of those partnerships and your
commitment to them?
Dr. Anderson. Yeah, so importance, in general, is where we
live. We have over 600 partners across the country, but there
are some that are committed and share a mission with us,
including EERC. And so, the EERC in North Dakota is really
critical to a number of our technology developments across rare
earth elements, gasification, coal-to-products, unconventional
oil and gas as well, and certainly, last but not least, in
CO2 sequestration. And so, there are, you know--
partnerships is really the name of the game for us because it
takes the entire value chain and skill set of folks across the
country to work and tackle these challenges.
Senator Hoeven. And, are you confident that we can crack
the code on carbon capture and storage from our coal-fired
electric plants and that it is an important part of our energy
mix?
Dr. Anderson. I am confident. The EIA, well, EIA and the
United States, and the IEA internationally, time and time again
have shown that if we're going to decarbonize our first
electricity sector and the economies, we need the technology of
carbon capture and utilization and storage. And so, it will be
a critical component to our pathway to decarbonizing the
economy.
Senator Hoeven. And not only, if we, I mean--and make it
happen in this country, then the rest of the world will be
adopters too and there is a lot of coal-fired electric in other
countries. So that is a huge factor of it.
Dr. Anderson. Yes, absolutely agree.
Senator Hoeven. Thank you very much.
Mr. Begger, in terms of trying to help make this happen in
terms of cracking the code on carbon capture, we have worked on
help through 45Q, the tax credit for geological storage. We
have worked on the loan guarantees through DOE and RUS (Rural
Utilities Service) and we have worked on funding help from DOE
for the equipment that needs to be put in place to make it
happen. Those are the kind of incentives and programs we are
trying to bring to work with our industry and the states to
make this happen. Tell me your view on how we continue to
enhance those tools to make CCUS happen.
Mr. Begger. Senator, I believe we need to make sure that we
have the infrastructure in place within the U.S. to actually
support these technologies. You know, I mentioned earlier that
for large-scale technologies above, you know, really a
megawatt, a megawatt and a half, to scale up to that 10 to 20
that people see, we send technologies and U.S. taxpayer dollars
to Mongstad facility in Norway. We have that ability in the
U.S. We should be building up facilities--two, three of those
that can do that here. It's all about scalability and access.
For a lot of smaller technology developers, they may not have
access to, you know, the National Carbon Capture Center or
EERC, so what are we doing to put the tools, or sort of grease
those skids, grease that glide path to technology development?
And I think a critical part of that is not just the
programmatic funding to do the things that we need to do, but
the bits and pieces on the back end to provide that platform
for these technologies to scale.
Senator Hoeven. How important is it that we get, that we
enhance 45Q with the direct pay option?
Mr. Begger. Senator, I think it's going to help really be a
game changer. Right now, you know, for 45Q if you're going the
tax equity financing route, you're only going to see a fraction
of that. So $35 for EOR, you know, I don't know what the exact
market is, but it might only be $17 or $18.
Senator Hoeven. Right.
Mr. Begger. So making sure that that money actually ends up
in the hands of the developers and the people moving the
project and not the financiers, I think, would be really
important.
Senator Hoeven. Yes, for that direct pay option 45Q the CBO
score is less than, the ten-year score is less than a billion
dollars. And that, as you said, would be a game changer, right?
Mr. Begger. That's correct. Just a week ago I was speaking
with a large EOR development company and just looking, they
were kind of walking through their thought process and how they
value and look at projects and they go, you know, a $5 to $10
differential is more than make or break, it's really are these
things profitable or not? And they said the direct pay option
would be something that could make up that gap.
Senator Hoeven. Yes, absolutely.
Thank you so much, I appreciate it. Thank you, Mr.
Chairman.
The Chairman [presiding]. Thank you, Senator.
I think we have Senator Hickenlooper.
Senator Hickenlooper. Hey, how are you doing?
The Chairman. Good.
Senator Hickenlooper. Sorry I am a little bit late.
The Chairman. No problem. Wrap it up.
Senator Hickenlooper. I think this is a great panel. I have
been dodging in and out so if I am asking a question that is
redundant, I apologize. I think having so much thought about
carbon utilization which, obviously, has the potential to be a
giant market opportunity, but at the same time we are working
to build our capacity to permanently store CO2
underground.
Dr. Anderson, the National Energy Technology Laboratory, if
we are awarded funding in Colorado to capture emissions from a
cement facility which could then store that CO2
permanently underground, how should we be thinking about the
relative value of permanent sequestration versus the
CO2 utilization we have been hearing about today?
Dr. Anderson. Senator Hickenlooper, thank you for that
question.
I think that, you know, the value of decarbonizing the
economy seems like, you know, one carbon avoided into the
atmosphere has its own inherent value, but as we drive down the
cost of the carbon removal and create the markets because of
the availability of low-cost CO2. CO2 is
not free today. And there are opportunities then to utilize it
into other products that are also permanently sequestered. And
so, one of our, you know, from our standpoint, one of the big
areas for us in our research program in subsurface
sequestration and permanence is to drive down the risk of
permanence as well and we have a multi-laboratory consortium
called the National Risk Assessment Partnership to help drive
down that risk for the surety of the permanance of
CO2 sequestered in the subsurface.
Senator Hickenlooper. Yes, and I love that collaborative
effort that you have on so many of these.
You have talked a little bit about the 45Q tax credit to
provide a revenue stream for capturing carbon so as to
incentivize the development of this, of these technologies and
to move us closer to getting to carbon free--or achieve
negative emissions, I guess you would call it. What effect
would it have--and a lot of people are talking about some sort
of a price on carbon, let's call it a fee and dividend but it
could be any of a variety of proposals--how would this help
accelerate that emerging field of carbon utilization?
Dr. Anderson. Well, I think that with the 45Q, and I made
an analogy earlier that it is a bit more similar to the
investment tax credits and the production tax credits that we
see on renewable deployment. And so, I think that as part of a
whole portfolio of incentivizing the movement and deployment of
the new technologies on the market, like 45Q does, like the
ITCs and PTCs do, it is really important to help incentivize
that movement into the market. And then, if there is long-term
certainty that can create the financial incentives, and we did
have a discussion with Mr. Begger just recently regarding how
some of those payments will go straight to the developer, but
at least some certainty around the future of carbon that will
provide the long-term incentives of large-scale investment for
CCUS is really important.
Senator Hickenlooper. Yes, yes, exactly.
Mr. Begger, you talked earlier about some of the issues
around capturing CO2 and I am, you know, this notion
of carbon sequestration which seemed, you know, a long shot not
so many years ago, clearly can be done and the cost continues
to come down. There are also infrastructure needs associated
with capturing CO2 and transporting it to permanent
sites or locations for reuse. Can you speak to the job growth
and economic opportunities associated with the buildout of this
kind of infrastructure?
Mr. Begger. Certainly, Senator.
You know, you just look at what it would all entail. I
mean, really the management of carbon is taking it from sources
and putting it toward sinks, you know, and the sinks can be a
lot of different things, whether it's, you know, geologic
sequestration, enhanced oil recovery, to products. But that's,
the process is we need to be able to capture it and move it,
you know, and capture could be on a power plant, it could be
direct air capture. I guess I'd look at it in terms of, you
know, in any other sort of industrial project. Certainly, a
buildup of an industrial facility could be many thousands of
jobs. Then you look at pipelines. I think it's pretty well
documented the number of jobs that are associated with
pipelines to move it from point A to point B. So, really, you
know, particular projects is going to be thousands of people,
so I think there's tremendous value in the buildout.
Senator Hickenlooper. Yes, well, I love the work that you
guys are doing. Actually, all of you, I think it is a broad
cross section. It takes me back to my--you know, I did do a
research project, I guess 40 years ago, on using salt as a
storage vehicle, salt formations as a storage vehicle for
radioactive materials for carbon, for CO2, things
like that. Anyway, it is good to see that these things go in
full circles.
Anyway, I yield back my time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Senator Barrasso.
Senator Barrasso. Terrific hearing, Mr. Chairman. Let me
thank you for bringing in these wonderful guests to talk about
some of the most exciting research that I think is happening
anywhere.
The Chairman. Well, thank you for bringing all the talent
you brought from Wyoming too.
Let me just say to all of you, it really has been a great,
great hearing. I want to thank you. But I am also challenging
you all to tell us how quickly we can get to 2030s target date
and what it takes if we start today to ramp up.
I am also very encouraged about those of us who have coal,
areas where coal plants have closed or coal power plants have
closed. This could give us a whole new manufacturing
renaissance there. It really fits better rather than trying to
go into a coal area and bringing some type of manufacturing
that does not fit with the culture. So that is so exciting
right now, but I really look forward to hearing from you all.
Members will have until the close of business tomorrow to
submit additional questions for the record.
Again, thank you, each and every one of you.
[Whereupon, at 11:57 a.m. the committee adjourned.]
APPENDIX MATERIAL SUBMITTED
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