NETL Funding Opportunity Announcements

The United States Department of Energy (DOE’s) Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Program intends to issue Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) no. DE-FOA-0002956 titled “Advancing Technology Development for Securing a Domestic Supply of Critical Minerals and Materials (CMM)”. This Notice of Intent to Issue (NOI) is for informational purposes only; the Department of Energy is not seeking comments on the information in this notice and applications are not being accepted at this time. DOE will not accept questions at this time regarding issuance of the FOA. Details on how to submit questions and comments will be provided in the FOA, if issued. Any information contained in this notice is subject to change.

This Notice of Intent supports DOE’s current vision to secure diverse, resilient, domestic CMM supply chains by expanding the Critical Minerals and Materials Program to fund additional processing research and development (R&D) for the recovery and refining of CMM, as required for critical supply chain use.

The intended FOA has four (4) Areas of Interest planned. The four Areas of Interest are as follows:

Area of Interest 1: Coproduction of CMM and Carbon Manufacturing Precursor Materials from Unconventional Coal and Other Carbon-based Feedstocks

Area of Interest 2: Recovery of Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) from Secondary and Unconventional Resources

Area of Interest 3: Critical Mineral Recovery from Produced Water

Area of Interest 4: Process Diversification: Production of Rare Earth Elements from Secondary/Unconventional Resources and Recycled Materials

The Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) in collaboration with the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) is issuing this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA).  Awards made under this FOA will be funded, in whole or in part, with funds appropriated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more commonly known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL).  The activities funded under this Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) support BIL Section 40302.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) seeks applications to address carbon conversion challenges across multiple areas: engineering-scale electrochemical conversion and refinery/petrochemical facility retrofits. Research and development in electrochemical conversion will address the challenge of extending system durability to a point where further scale-up is warranted under future efforts. Feasibility studies of refinery and petrochemical facility retrofits will examine pathways for retrofitting of facilities for carbon utilization and production of value-added products. It is anticipated that responses and results of these studies could inform follow-on funding opportunities to advance proposed retrofit or renovations for carbon conversion.

The vision of the Carbon Ore, Rare Earth, and Critical Minerals (CORE-CM) Initiative is to catalyze regional economic growth and job creation by realizing the full potential value of natural resources, such as coal, throughout the United States. It has been designed to address the upstream and midstream critical minerals and materials (CMM) supply chain and downstream manufacturing of valuable, nonfuel, carbon-based products, to accelerate the realization of full potential for unconventional and secondary sources of CMM and carbon ore across the United States. Feedstocks that could be considered for domestic production to enhance national and economic security of CMM include fossil fuel energy and similar waste streams, such as coal waste and by-products, oil and gas produced waters, active mineral mines tailings and byproducts, and brines produced as part of carbon sequestration efforts. They can also be used as sources of carbon for production of valuable, nonfuel, carbon-based products (CBPs).