Department of Energy Secretary Samuel W Bodman made the announcement this week saying grant recipients will contribute nearly $8 million in cost sharing for the program.

The projects support the Global Climate Change Initiative, which calls for an 18% reduction in US greenhouse gas intensity (the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to economic output) by 2012.

Sequestration uses a variety of methods to remove greenhouse gases from power plant emissions or the air itself, and securely store those gases in geologic formations, soils and vegetation, or in other environmentally safe forms.

The newly selected projects will focus on three pathways to CO2 capture:

Pre-combustion, in which fuel is gasified to form a mixture of hydrogen and CO2, called synthesis gas or "syngas", and CO2 is captured from the syngas before it is combusted;

Post-combustion, which involves capturing CO2 from flue gas after fuel has been combusted in air; and

Oxycombustion, in which fuel is combusted in pure or nearly pure oxygen rather than air, producing an exhaust mixture of CO2 and water that can easily be processed to produce pure CO2.

The selected projects include:

Carbozyme (Monmouth Junction, N.J.) – to evolve a second generation of its enzyme-based membrane design for capturing CO2 from the flue gas of coal-fired power plants. The technology has demonstrated high capture efficiency and low energy cost. (DOE share: $944,807; recipient share: $229,863; duration: 36 months)

Membrane Technology and Research (Menlo Park, California) – to develop a cost-effective, membrane-based process to separate CO2 from the flue gas of coal-fired power plants. The researchers also intend to deliver condensed, high-pressure, supercritical CO2 to a pipeline for sequestration. (DOE share: $788,266; recipient share: $197,067; duration: 24 months)

University of Akron (Akron, Ohio) – to develop a highly efficient, low-cost CO2 capture system. Built on integration of metal monoliths, material synthesis and low-cost fabrication techniques, the researchers anticipate a breakthrough technology for the removal of CO2 from the flue gas of coal-fired power plants. (DOE share: $764,995; recipient share: $156,702; duration: 48 months)

Carbozyme (Monmouth Junction, N.J.) – to design, construct, test and demonstrate a simple, efficient and readily scalable enzyme-based flue gas cleanup technology for CO2 capture; and demonstrate a method for reasonable-cost treatment of other pollutants to achieve near-zero emissions from pulverised coal power plants. (DOE share: $4,799,175; recipient share: $1,370,430; duration: 36 months)

Praxair (Tonawanda, N.Y.) – to develop an oxycombustion process using an oxygen transport membrane to capture CO2 from coal-fired power plants. (DOE share: $4,742,780; recipient share: $2,553,806; duration: 36 months)

Research Triangle Institute (Research Triangle Park, N.C.) – to expand on the process the researchers have developed to capture CO2 from power plant flue gas using an inexpensive, dry, regenerable sorbent. (DOE share: $3,211,997; recipient share: $803,175; duration: 36 months)

SRI International (Menlo Park, California) – to fabricate a technically and economically viable CO2-capture system based on a promising membrane material for pre-combustion-based capture of CO2 . (DOE share: $4,047,695; recipient share: $1,036,159; duration: 36 months)

University of Notre Dame (Notre Dame, Indiana) – to focus on the development of a new liquid absorbent for efficient post-combustion capture of CO2 from coal-fired power plants. (DOE share: $2,214,590; recipient share: $793,861; duration: 36 months)

UOP (Des Plaines, Illinois), a Honeywell Company – to develop a process that uses novel microporous metal organic frameworks having extremely high adsorption capacities for the removal of CO2 from coal-fired power plant flue gas. (DOE share: $2,238,171; recipient share: $559,543; duration: 36 months).