CarbonCapture Inc., which had wanted to build one of the world’s largest direct air capture of carbon dioxide and storage projects in southwestern Wyoming, is pulling the plug on development of the complex in the Cowboy State.
“We’ve been seeing growing competition for clean power amongst industries that are emerging much faster than anybody would have ever predicted,” said Adrian Corless, CEO of CarbonCapture, a Los Angeles-based clean technology company.
CarbonCapture cited “intense competition from data centers” in the region for electricity as partially the reason why it is moving from Wyoming.
“This has acutely affected our efforts in Wyoming, and as a result, we’ve decided to pause our development of Project Bison and to relocate the deployment of our first-of-a-kind project outside the state,” Corless said.
A new location will be announced in coming months, Corless said.
The clean power requirements for Project Bison were said to be a main reason for the move, possibly requiring as much as three times what could be generated by the 345-megawatt Natrium nuclear reactor being built in Kemmerer, Wyoming, by the billionaire Bill Gates-backed TerraPower LLC.
A CarbonCapture spokeswoman declined to respond to questions regarding the project.
Limited Options
Other than wind or solar forms of generation — which are severely limited — geothermal energy was an option. However, that energy is off-limits in Wyoming because of its concentration on federally owned park land where most of these deposits are located.
The only other major direct air capture project underway in the world is Orca, located in Iceland. This facility is powered with geothermal energy and can capture about 500 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
To make the business model work, CarbonCapture needs to sell carbon credits at a premium to offset a company’s emissions — think Google or Meta, parent of Facebook.
Based on the huge power demands for Project Bison, the supply-and-demand market for selling carbon credits wasn’t looking appealing in Wyoming with the scarcity of clean power resources to buy.
“Despite the progress we’ve experienced in materials science and our manufacturing breakthroughs, we've been finding it difficult to deal with some of the challenges around deployment,” Corless wrote in a statement.
“We have no doubt that Wyoming will continue to build out clean energy infrastructure, but to reduce our short-term risks, we need to focus on a site where we can more quickly deploy our technology alongside robust shared infrastructure,” he added.
Massive Project Killed
Project Bison was massive in scope and would have required hundreds of 40-foot-long shipping containers equipped with filters that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air.
Once the filters are saturated, they are heated up, and the carbon is extracted from the modules and pumped deep underground in saline aquifers for permanent storage.
The original plan was to begin construction of the project on private land held by ranchers in Rock Springs and Green River, both in Wyoming’s Sweetwater County, before the end of the year.
In his statement, Corless said that production on full-scale commercial modules to capture carbon dioxide from the air will begin at a manufacturing facility in Arizona later this year.
The decision to relocate the deployment of Project Bison outside of Wyoming and pause development efforts related to the project was driven by a desire to build the project “as quickly as possible,” he said.
“Though Wyoming is developing clean energy to power direct air capture facilities including traditional renewable projects and innovate nuclear projects, our development timeline requires these key ingredients on a large scale in the very near term,” Corless said. “As a result, we are focusing on other sites where a shorter timeline is more achievable.”
Rob Creager, executive director of the Wyoming Energy Authority, was not immediately available to comment on the impact of the loss from CarbonCapture’s departure.
Up In Smoke
This past spring, CarbonCapture disclosed plans to identify strategic energy partners with an interest in finding short- and long-term power generation and transmission solutions for what it called the Wyoming Regional Direct Air Capture Hub.
The hub competition is akin to a similar energy initiative that Wyoming lost out on last fall.
In that competition, which is not related to the direct air capture procurement, Wyoming officials were disappointed when a $1.25 billion Western region hydrogen hub went somewhere else.
In the direct air capture hub competition, there’s $1.1 billion at stake.
In April, Patricia Loria, vice president of business development with CarbonCapture, told Cowboy State Daily that the proposed hub would be in Wyoming should it win the competition.
The U.S. Department of Energy is considering CarbonCapture and its partner group for the procurement.
DOE wants to bring on board two additional hub project participants in the direct air carbon hub initiative. Two groups were selected in August 2023, with CarbonCapture considered a finalist for one of the open slots, Loria said.
In 2023, DOE announced up to $1.2 billion for the nation’s first direct air capture demonstrations in Texas and Louisiana, creating a total of 4,800 jobs.
In Louisiana, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute is working with Switzerland’s Climeworks AG and San Francisco-based Heirloom Carbon Technologies Inc. to capture more than 1 million metric tons of existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year and store it underground.
In Texas, 1PointFive LLC, a unit of Houston-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., and partners Carbon Engineering Ltd. of Canada and Worley Ltd. of Australia, are working on a direct air carbon facility designed to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually with a saline storage site.
Wyoming Loses Out
In 2023, CarbonCapture and a team of strategic partners, including the University of Wyoming, received $12.5 million from DOE to develop a megaton-scale direct air capture hub in southwestern Wyoming.
On this project, CarbonCapture partnered with Dallas-based Frontier Carbon Solutions LLC, which is working to sequester the carbon dioxide in underground formations or used as a feedstock in the production of aviation fuel by partner Twelve Benefit Corp., a chemical technology company based in Berkeley, California.
The first phase CarbonCapture’s demonstration project, dubbed Project Bison, had been scheduled to begin in 2025.
In this project, CarbonCapture said that it would begin removing about 12,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually. This amount will scale up to about 200,000 tons by 2026, and 5 million tons a year by 2030.
Pat Maio can be reached at pat@cowboystatedaily.com.
