Projects at Wyoming Integrated Test Center at Basin Electric’s Dry Fork Station earn DOE funding

Several carbon capture and storage research projects hosted at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center at Basin Electric’s Dry Fork Station near Gillette have earned funding through the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED).

Membrane Technology and Research (MTR) Carbon Capture announced Mar. 28 that it received $4.6 million to develop a Front-End Engineering Design (FEED) study for an integrated carbon capture and storage project at Dry Fork Station. Wyoming CarbonSAFE, led by the University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources (SER), is a partner for sequestering the captured carbon dioxide and is a co-recipient of the award.

The project includes a FEED study for a proposed capture plant featuring MTR Carbon Capture’s second-generation Polaris^TM membrane. The project 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 OCED’s 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.

“Basin Electric congratulates MTR Carbon Capture on an important next step in further evaluating carbon capture at our Dry Fork Station,” said Todd Brickhouse, CEO and general manager of Basin Electric. “The investment required to bring carbon capture and storage technology from study to pilot to full-scale production is substantial, and successful deployment will require partnerships at many different levels. Dispatchable generation facilities such as Dry Fork Station are integral to Basin Electric providing reliable and affordable electricity to our membership, and the work MTR Carbon Capture is doing today is important to keeping electricity reliable across our nation.”

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 this year, it will be the world’s largest membrane-based carbon capture pilot project.

Sorbent-based post-combustion capture system

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.

Led by TDA in collaboration with global energy technology company SLB as the technology development and deployment partner, the project is a large-scale pilot with the aim of testing a sorbent based post-combustion carbon capture system capable of capturing 158,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide each year -- an amount equivalent to the annual carbon dioxide emissions of 35,000 gasoline-powered cars.

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. Supported by DOE funding from the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management, the testing was successfully completed in Fall 2023.

Algae-based carbon technology

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, with about six months of testing at the facility.

University of Wyoming’s team will convert the liquid from algae pyrolysis into advanced energy materials such as carbon nanofiber supercapacitor electrodes, under the direction of University of Wyoming’s School of Energy Resources.