Basin Electric Power Cooperative said several carbon capture and storage (CCS) research projects hosted at the co-op’s Dry Fork Station near Gillette, Wyoming have earned federal funding.
The 405 MW coal-fired Dry Fork plant is home to the Wyoming Integrated Test Center. The CCS testing facility allows CO2 capture technology companies access to the flue gas that would otherwise be released from the plant.
In March Membrane Technology and Research (MTR) Carbon Capture announced that it received $4.6 million to develop a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) study for an integrated CCS project at Dry Fork. Wyoming CarbonSAFE, led by the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources (SER), is a partner for sequestering the captured CO2 and is a co-recipient of the award.
MTR Carbon Capture will use its proprietary Polaris polymeric membrane. The company aims to capture, compress and store onsite 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, achieving at least a 90% carbon capture rate.
This FEED study funding is part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED) Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, which advances carbon management technologies. The goal of the program is to accelerate the demonstration and deployment of integrated carbon capture, transport, and storage technologies.
This project is the second DOE award for MTR Carbon Capture at Dry Fork Station. In 2023, the company began construction on a large-scale pilot plant at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center to capture carbon dioxide from flue gas produced at Dry Fork Station. When operational later in 2024, the company claims it will be the world’s largest membrane-based carbon capture pilot project.
In February, OCED announced the selection of TDA Research Inc. (TDA) to negotiate an award of up to $49 million to test a carbon capture system at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center. TDA is collaborating with global energy technology company SLB as its technology development and deployment partner.
The project is a large-scale pilot that will test a sorbent based post-combustion CO2 capture system capable of capturing 158,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year.
TDA began testing several carbon capture technologies based on novel sorbents and sorbent/membrane hybrids to remove carbon dioxide from flue gas in Fall 2019. Thanks to DOE funding, testing was completed in Fall 2023.
In January, a $2.5 million project was announced with Colorado State University, the University of Wyoming, and Living Ink Technologies to convert an industrial source of carbon dioxide into high-value materials through an algae-based carbon transfer process.
The Wyoming Integrated Test Center project, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, began its initial phase in 2023. The research will run for three years. Six months of that time will be for testing at the facility.
The University of Wyoming team will convert the liquid from algae pyrolysis into materials such as carbon nanofiber supercapacitor electrodes, under the direction of the University’s School of Energy Resources.
