Carbon capture project to be launched in Wyoming
Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon and Carbontech Labs announced the launch of a $1.25 million project to help researchers find ways to turn greenhouse-gas emissions from coal-fired power plants into products that can be sold for a profit.
“One of the opportunities here, from a policy standpoint I think, is what is really, truly going to remove carbon from our atmosphere?” said Gordon.
Carbontech Labs, a research accelerator created by Oakland, CA-based nonprofit Carbon180, will provide $1 million. Wyoming is contributing $250,000.
Jeremy Grantham an investor who built his wealth as co-founded the Boston-based investment firm Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo contributed $1 million to Carbon 180 from the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust the Casper Star Tribune reported.
Those funded through the Wyoming program will test their carbon-capture proposals at a coal-fired power plant in the Powder River Basin, the top coal-producing region in the United States.
The initiative links two men who have very different ways of talking about climate change.
“Fossil fuels will either run out, destroy the planet, or both. The only possible way to avoid this outcome is rapid and complete de-carbonization of our economy. Needless to say, this is an extremely difficult thing to pull off,” Grantham said in a speech last June at the Morningstar Investment Conference in Chicago.
Grantham said he is “all in” on climate change and toxic environmental damage and has 98 percent of his net worth in two foundations dedicated to those causes.
Gordon, meanwhile, has been less than strident on the issue of fossil fuels and climate change. He declined to answer Thursday whether he thought climate change was human-caused and an urgent problem, though he acknowledged seeing its signs.
Revenue from Wyoming’s coal, oil and natural gas industries provide a huge share of the state budget — over half in some years. Lately wavering revenue from fossil-fuel extraction, especially coal, has forced state officials to make major cuts and reconsider where the state gets its money.
That in mind, state officials have been keen to secure a viable future for its coal industry roiled by several recent, major bankruptcies.
Wyoming contributed $15 million to build a carbon-capture test facility at Basin Electric’s Dry Fork Station near Gillette. Recipients of the $1.25 million in Carbontech and state funding — there could be several — will test techniques at the facility that could range from farming algae to making concrete, said Matt Lucas, associate director of Carbontech.
“We’re enabling a pathway to that new carbon economy that stores more carbon than it emits,” Lucas said.
Carbontech now will begin taking funding applicants.
The facility, called the Wyoming Integrated Test Center, also will be the site of the final rounds of a separate, $20 million contest organized by the XPRIZE Foundation to find profitable uses for carbon dioxide emitted by power plants.