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Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage CenterAn MIT Energy
Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Center
The Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) Center
conducts cutting-edge research and delivers forward-looking
techno-economic assessments with the goal of reducing the cost of
carbon capture, enabling secure carbon storage options, and
developing carbon utilization opportunities.
To achieve a global transition to a low-carbon energy system
within the coming decades, carbon capture, utilization, and storage
(CCUS) technologies can and should play a vital role in limiting or
even reducing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere.
These technologies hold great promise for ameliorating the effects
of excess emissions by capturing CO2—particularly from industrial
operations and power facilities—and storing it safely.
Current CCUS technology has been demonstrated at the
million-ton-of-CO2 scale at about 20 facilities worldwide; however,
there is great opportunity for improvements in both cost and
performance. The development of improved technologies for carbon
capture, utilization, and storage will require a wide range of
expertise—from novel chemistry, biology, and engineering for
capture to subsurface science and engineering at field scale for
storage. It will also require cross-disciplinary research in
engineering, science, and policy, as well as strong
collaborations among academia, industry, and government.
These elements are combined through MIT’s CCUS Center, one of
the Low-Carbon Energy Centers developed by the MIT Energy
Initiative to advance technologies key to addressing climate
change.
Carbon capture, utilization, and storage hold great promise for
ameliorating the effects of excess emissions by capturing
CO2—particularly from industrial operations and power
facilities—converting some of this CO2 into useful products, and
storing what is not used safely and securely.”
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— Professor T. Alan Hatton Co-Director, Carbon Capture,
Utilization, and Storage Center
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Research specialties
The CCUS Center draws on MIT’s faculty members’ extensive
existing research capability to focus on three major areas:
capture, utilization, and geologic storage. To solve the challenges
associated with CCUS, participants in the Center apply innovative
technology in fields such as molecular simulation; materials
design; catalytic processes; fluid mechanics; seismic, geodetic,
and electromagnetic imaging; and systems analysis. In addition to
the technology focus, the Center’s research capability includes
economics, policy, regulatory, and business expertise.
Additionally, the Center’s techno-economic and systems analysis
group focuses on technology assessments, economic modeling, and an
analysis of the regulatory and political aspects of deploying CCUS
technologies at scale. Interactions with Center members help guide
the direction of this work.
Capture:
• Electrochemically modulated carbon capture: New technologies
in which the affinity of separations media can be facilitated
through electrochemical changes in oxidation state of either the
CO2 complexing agent directly, or of an additive that competes with
the complexing agent and displaces the CO2 in the regeneration
step.
• Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs): An emerging technology for
gas storage and separation. MIT researchers are working to devise
new methods that will afford the synthesis and deposition of MOF
thin films.
• Metal oxide covalent network ultrathin films: These films
exhibit high permeabilities and selectivities for the separation of
CO2 from gas mixtures relative to membrane materials currently
under consideration for scrubbing smokestack emissions.
• High temperature metal oxide adsorbents: New adsorbent
materials are tailored to provide very high CO2 capacities at
elevated temperatures for treatment of CO2-rich gases at process
temperatures.
Goals and approach
The goals of the CCUS Center are to:
• Promote research through in-depth interactions between
industry, government, and academia; multiple industrial sectors;
and diverse academic disciplines;
• Shorten development time for getting research programs up and
running: managing the uncertainty through ongoing assessment;
• Focus on enabling technologies that hold the key to innovative
and transformative breakthroughs; and
• Work with industrial members to move new ideas into the world
at scale.
Phot
o: S
tuar
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CO2 reduction and utilization:
• Electrochemical CO2 fixation: State-of-the art catalytic
methods for using low-carbon renewable electricity to drive the
conversion of CO2 into fuels, commodity chemicals, and critical
materials.
• Thermochemical CO2 fixation: Advanced catalytic materials for
combining CO2 and renewable-derived hydrogen to generate diverse
linchpin chemical intermediates and fuel precursors.
• Molecular simulation: Identifying and designing better
catalytic materials for CO2 utilization across both electrochemical
and thermochemical pathways.
Geologic storage:
• Fluid dynamics: Investigating how liquids spread, flow, and
puddle at all levels, from the molecular, to the pore, to the
fracture, to the reservoir in order to better describe multiphase
flows in complex field systems.
• Geochemical processes: Understanding how CO2 reacts with the
pore fluids and host rocks in the subsurface, altering permeability
and strength, and leading to permanent storage via
mineralization.
• Geophysical imaging: Imaging increasingly complicated
geological environments to develop a more thorough understanding of
the opportunities and risks of underground carbon storage.
• Formation testing, monitoring, and verification: Addressing
the challenges of borehole science, fractured reservoirs, reservoir
monitoring, and near-surface environmental geophysics.
Exploratory projects
The goal of these projects is to explore new areas that can
advance the application of CCUS technology. The Center looks for
innovative faculty members and challenges them to use their
expertise to solve problems in CCUS through Center member-supported
seed funding. The Center currently has four exploratory research
projects:
• Formation of isoporous free volume elements using UV
acidolysis reactions (Zachary P. Smith, Chemical Engineering)
• Electrochemical manufacturing of methanol from carbon dioxide
feedstocks (Karthish Manthiram, Chemical Engineering)
• Investigation of the feasibility of CO2 storage in basalts
(Timothy L. Grove, Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences)
• First-principles computational design of novel
electrocatalysts for CO2 conversion to methanol (Alexie Kolpak,
Mechanical Engineering)
There is a fundamental incompatibility, at least for the next
several decades, between the need to improve the standard of living
of people in developing countries and the desire to keep fossil
fuels in the ground. We could resolve this incompatibility by using
the energy stored in fossil fuels while returning the associated
carbon dioxide to the subsurface. This is unlikely to happen
without innovation in capturing, utilizing, and storing
carbon—innovation that MIT can and should provide!”
“— Professor Bradford H. Hager Co-Director, Carbon Capture,
Utilization, and Storage Center
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MIT ENERGY INITIATIVE
Massachusetts Institute of Technology77 Massachusetts Avenue,
E19-307Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
energy.mit.edu
Co-Directors:Bradford H. Hager, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of
Earth SciencesT. Alan Hatton, Ralph Landau Professor & Director
of the David H. Koch School of Chemical Engineering Practice
Associate Director: Yogesh Surendranath, Paul M. Cook Career
Development Associate Professor of Chemistry
Executive Director: Howard Herzog, Senior Research Engineer, MIT
Energy Initiative
Techno-Economic Team:Francis O’Sullivan, Director of Research,
MIT Energy Initiative Emre Gençer, Postdoctoral Associate, MIT
Energy Initiative
Asia Pacific Energy Partnership Program Manager: Wendy Duan, MIT
Energy Initiative
Interested in joining us?
For additional information or to join the Carbon Capture,
Utilization, and Storage Center, please contact:
Howard HerzogExecutive [email protected]
To see a list of current members, visit
ccuscenter.mit.edu/members.
Membership benefits
The CCUS Center holds two member workshops each year to discuss
new research results and analyses. In addition to these, Members
have access to a variety of invitation-only workshops and webinars,
such as the MITEI annual research conference. Members also benefit
from dedicated techno-economic analyses of the CCUS industry and
exploratory research projects on groundbreaking CCUS topics. For a
full list of benefits and deliverables, visit:
ccuscenter.mit.edu/join.
Background photo: Michael Szulczewski