Last month I had the honor of attending the Research Experience in Carbon Sequestration (RECS) program, sponsored by the Dept. of Energy, Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (DOE FECM). The program took place in locations throughout Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota and it was an experience to learn about the entire value chain of carbon management.

Carbon management refers to managing, if not reducing or removing, carbon dioxide (CO2), an atmosphere-warming gas, emissions. The value chain for this management usually includes the following aspects:

• Generation: How is CO2 generated? Often CO2 is generated from human activities that rely on burning fossil fuels. This includes electricity generation, burning gasoline or diesel for transportation fuel, and heavy industries, such as cement or steel production.
• Capture: Can the CO2 be captured? Yes! The CO2 can be captured either from a concentrated smoke stack before entering the atmosphere, or from the atmosphere itself. However, capturing it from the atmosphere, often requires more energy because in the atmosphere it becomes much more dilute than it would be in a smoke stack.
• Storage: Once the CO2 is captured, where does it go? The CO2 captured can be stored in geologic reservoirs under the Earth’s surface. Or…
• Utilization: Once the CO2 is captured, where does it go? The CO2 captured can also be used in products. It can be used as a feedstock for the chemical industry to generate non-fossil hydrocarbons or plastics, among other things.
• Transportation: If the CO2 captured is not the same location as the storage or utilization facility, how does the CO2 move between places? The CO2 captured from a smoke stack or the atmosphere can be moved with trucks, rail, or pipelines to get from one location to another. For large amounts of CO2, a pipeline is the most economic option, but there are is not a lot of existing CO2 pipeline infrastructure.

So why is this important? CO2 is a one of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that is contributing to climate change. There is an burgeoning industry, the Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS) industry that is made up of many sectors looking at capturing CO2 both from smoke stacks and the atmosphere and either putting it to use or storing it. This industry is slated to be one of the next trillion dollar industries, and as of now, there are not enough folks working toward these solving these problems!

That said, each of these pillars of the carbon value chain require very different knowledge and training. RECS gave me the opportunity to meet with other experts from these various pillars and explore the pillars in which I am not formally trained. In addition to exploring the pillars mentioned above, discussion of environmental justice was also implemented in this year’s curriculum, by inviting the Environmental Justice Fellows from American University to attend some of the RECS programming too. This year, with the RECS program, I got to the opportunity to visit

• National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) main campus and Flatirons campus
• ION Clean Energy, a startup focused on using liquid-solvent carbon capture technology to capture CO2 from smoke stacks
• Global Thermostat, a startup focused on using solid-sorbent carbon capture technology to capture CO2 from the atmosphere
• University of Wyoming, university partner for the 2023 RECS program and a leader in energy generation science and CO2 storage
• Dry Fork Generating Station, the cleanest coal plant in the United States, outfitted to allow for carbon capture companies to deploy demonstration-scale experiments to test and de-risk their technology. This site also have two CarbonSAFE wells that are being permitted to inject CO2 under ground into porous structures where it will be monitored to ensure that it is stored securely overtime.

For any of these large-scale engineering deployments to be successful, there needs to be buy-in from the community who will be most impacted by the technology’s presence and operation. Prior to the more recent discussions about environmental justice and the complete lack of a precedence for doing this work, most community and public engagement opportunities were focused on opposition mitigation (reducing opposition), as opposed to gaining enthusiastic consent. To move forward with developing methods around environmental justice centered deployments, not only does a new precedent need to be made, but the harms inflicted on communities due to the lack of a precedent need to be acknowledged, if not undone.

In my personal opinion, it was so valuable to have the EJ fellows join us from American University! It was one of the few times that I’ve been encouraged to engage with this aspect of deployment in a technical setting (which is unfortunate). However, due to technologists typically having a lack of exposure to these topics (which also reflects on formal education institutions), there is a degree of level-setting that is required for constructive dialogue and outcomes. This level-setting needs to be done between all parties involved, so that the scope of the conversation is adequately understood and the assumptions brining brought to the table are clearly communicated. This upfront work and the conclusions that assist in pointing out gaps in the traditional engineering/science knowledge space may be reasons why formal institutions have been wary to integrate these concepts more explicitly. When this level-setting is not in place, tensions between folks who often sit on opposite sides of the table can be escalated despite having similar, if not the same goals.