On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced it was accepting letters of interest for $2.1 billion in loans for its Carbon Dioxide Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation program (CIFIA).
Part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, CIFIA provides funding for large-capacity, shared carbon dioxide (CO2) transportation projects, including pipelines, rail transport, ships and barges, and ground shipping, that connects anthropogenic sources of carbon with its storage or utilization endpoints.
“One giant challenge in deploying carbon management technologies to reduce emissions is to be able to transport the CO2 to where it is ultimately sequestered or used up,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “The CIFIA program will help industry overcome the challenges to accessing the upfront capital needed to build shared infrastructure projects that are essential to advancing our clean energy economy.”
Officials said the funding the projects will help form a “domestic interconnected carbon management ecosystem” that will help the country meet its net-zero greenhouse gas goals by 2050. Carbon management technologies like CO2 transportation, as well as direct air capture, carbon capture from industry and power generation, and carbon conversion, will have to be deployed in large scale in the coming decades, the DOE said, to meet those goals.
CIFIA supports those goals by providing direct loans, loan guarantees, and grants to finance the buildout of the CO2 transportation infrastructure that will help create an interconnected carbon management ecosystem to enable the commercial deployment of carbon management technologies, the department said.
The program is administered jointly by the DOE’s Loan Programs Office and the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management. Interested applicants are encouraged to contact the DOE before submitting a letter of interest by emailing CIFIA@hq.doe.gov with the subject line “CIFIA Pre-application Consultation.”