Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
6/19/2015
Loan guarantees awarded through the Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office’s Title XVII solicitations will serve to bring pilot stage technologies to a point of development where government funding is no longer needed, officials from the Loan Program Office said this week at a briefing hosted by the United States Energy Association. “When you’re looking at research development and early pilot projects, that’s where you’ll see the Department of Energy programs like … the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Fossil Energy, Nuclear Energy, the Office of Electricity Transmission and Distribution. They’re working on those R&D projects and some of the first pilot and small-scale demonstration projects,” Sydney Schneir, special adviser with the DOE Loan Program Office, explained during the briefing. “Were LPO fits in is really trying to bridge that gap to the commercial deployment of technologies so that they can be fully deployed at commercial-scale without government assistance.”
Currently, $8 billion in loan guarantees is available for fossil energy projects that reduce carbon emissions, including carbon capture and storage. “Carbon capture we’re very interested in. Obviously capture from traditional coal or natural gas plants, geologic storage, enhanced oil recovery, but also carbon capture in saleable products like asphalt,” Joseph Marhamati, Program Management Analyst with the DOE Loan Program Office, explained. No guarantees have been awarded under first round of the fossil energy solicitation, the final submission date for which was May 31, 2014.
A second round of solicitations is ongoing and “Part I” application submissions are being accepted until Oct. 31, 2015. After the Part I deadline, the applications will be assessed and qualifying projects may be asked to submit a Part II application, which would be due by Feb. 28, 2016. “We are seeing a lot of interest in the solicitations. We haven’t seen any of the applicants right now get to the point of a conditional commitment yet because a lot of the applicants are still in the pipeline and we’re still working through due diligence and things like that. We expect to see a lot of activity, but right now we’re just seeing a lot of applications come in in response to the solicitations,” Schneir said.
