Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

A member of Cohort 6 of the “Innovation Crossroads” program at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) are among 33 research and development projects to share $131 million in funding announced on Monday by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The projects advance the wide-scale deployment of carbon management technologies to reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) pollution. The local recipients are part of DOE’s “Carbon Management” funding opportunity that will develop technologies to capture CO₂ from utility and industrial sources or directly from the atmosphere and transport it either for permanent geologic storage or for conversion into valuable products such as fuels and chemicals.

• Holocene Climate Corporation, the member of the “Innovation Crossroads” program, plans to partner with ORNL to conduct bench-scale testing of a new optimized direct air capture system using amino acids and guanidine compounds, a chemical process invented at ORNL. Holocene plans to use ORNL’s chemistry to further develop and deploy the technology on a commercial scale. Total federal funding is $1.5 million with $420,000 of match.
• UTK is part of a partnership led by the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa that will develop a low-cost and eco-friendly biomolecule-regulated carbonation system. The system will convert calcium-rich, alkaline construction and industrial wastes, such as recycled concrete fines, cement kiln dust, and high calcium fly ash, into carbon-negative and carbonate-rich supplementary cementitious materials, and then permanently store CO₂ in the produced materials. Other partners are the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Sutterlin Research LLC. Total federal funding is $2 million with a $500,002 match.

More details can be found here.

---