OUTHERE,THEBESTRENEWABLESTRATEGY BEGINSWITHRELIABILITY.

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In June, Bakken and Mitsubishi Power Americas said they had entered a partnership to create a world-class clean hydrogen hub in North Dakota to produce, store, transport, and locally capture and sequester carbon. Part of that process was Bakken Energy reaching an agreement with Basin Electric to purchase the assets of Dakota Gasification Co., a subsidiary of Basin Electric and owner of the Great Plains Synfuels Plant.

Accordingly, the Synfuels facility will form the nucleus of a clean energy hub designed to aggressively advance regional, national, and global decarbonization objectives through the development of clean hydrogen applications for the agriculture, power, and transportation sectors.

The proposed project will enable the facility to capture up to 3.5 million tons of CO2 per year and will serve as part of the largest coal-based CCUS project to use geologic storage.

“The Dakota Gasification Company was already an early leader in CCUS, and this proposed expansion is another milestone in our state’s efforts to crack the code on this critical energy technology – the largest coal-based carbon capture project to use geologic storage,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., said in a statement in September. “We’re able to make progress like this because we’ve been laying the groundwork for geologic storage of CO2 in North Dakota since 2008.”

He said that means not only providing regulatory certainty, but also advancing key incentives at the federal level, including the 45Q tax credit and loan guarantees for project developers.

“This project is just an additional opportunity we are pursuing as we continue to look at multiple paths going forward for Dakota Gas,” Dietz said.

Another carbon-capture proposal is Project Tundra, which has been in the works for a number of years, and is an effort headed by Minnkota Power Cooperative, UND’s Energy & Environmental Research Center, North Dakota Industrial Commission and the Lignite Energy Council. It would install a carbon-capture system at Minnkota’s Milton R. Young Station in Center, N.D.

The proposed $1 billion project would potentially capture more than 90% of the carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning plants – or the equivalent of taking 600,000 cars off the road, according to information from Minnkota – and be stored indefinitely in rock formations about a mile underground near the facility.

Back over at the EERC, Gorecki is an eyewitness to the technology that continues to improve carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery.

“We’ve been working in industry on how to decrease the cost and increase the capture,” he said. “There’s been a lot of things that have been advanced and … we’ll continue to advance and learn things from projects to drive down that cost.”

Gov. Doug Burgum has stated he wants North Dakota to become carbon neutral by 2030 while retaining the core position of its fossil fuel industries.

But Gorecki said that, in large part, depends on policy. When achieved, the end result will have big dividends felt across the planet.

“I think we’re on the cusp,” Gorecki said. “We have been working on all of these things to make (carbon capture) more affordable, lower the cost and increase the efficiency from the storage side, and we’ve been trying to figure out how to do it — do the monitoring and ensure containment — in real time or near real time. We’ve made those advances. … We know we can do it, we know we have the technology, but it’s about the economic side having the policy in place.

“If it’s going to happen, now is the time. There are projects … that are moving forward. Projects like Tundra that are moving forward. We’re going to see, I think, a proliferation of the technology, not just deployed in the United States or North Dakota, but we’re going to see that technology deployed all over the world. When we can accomplish those types of things, we’re really going to make change, to provide that reliable, affordable power that the world needs, particularly in the developing countries.”