PROGRAM AREA OVERVIEW --
OFFICE OF FOSSIL ENERGY

Fossil energy plays a key role in our Nation's prosperity, and it is important that we secure an adequate energy supply from our coal, natural gas, and oil resources.  However, national complacency, derived from low-cost imported oil, has allowed petroleum imports to increase to alarming levels.  We need not go far back in history to find out how uncertainty in petroleum supply can affect our Nation's economic growth.  Nonetheless, our near term power generation, heating, and transportation needs still require the utilization of these hydrocarbon-based fuels.  As the economy expands, demand for hydrocarbons will increase accordingly.  Therefore, the Office of Fossil Energy seeks to develop advanced fossil energy technologies that are environmentally sound and economically competitive.

Technological innovation is required to take advantage of the United States' large supply of coal and natural gas reserves.  Coal's major drawback is that it contains sulfur, nitrogen, mercury, and other trace heavy metals, precursors of pollutants that could have deleterious effects on the environment.  Also, natural gas is produced with a wide variety of pollutant-forming compounds, which preclude some applications such as fuel cells.  For both coal and natural gas, further improvements are needed to develop advanced, low cost, high-efficiency processes for the production of clean energy.  In addition, it is prudent to consider ways to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that are generated by the combustion of fossil fuels, to investigate carbon sequestration in geological and other systems, to consider hydrogen as alternate fuel, and to mitigate impacts on water resources.  Advanced technology development in materials that assure compatibility with advances in power systems – as well as innovations in fuel cells, measurements, sensors, monitors, and controls – will be needed for these technologies to be commercially competitive.

Improvements are also needed in our ability to recover both oil and natural gas.  About two-thirds of our national petroleum reserve is "unrecoverable"; i.e., it cannot be extracted economically by conventional means.  This unused resource could play a major role in supplementing the national petroleum supply if efficient approaches were developed for improved extraction.  Natural gas production and utilization could also be increased through improved characterization of reserves and through better infrastructure.

The following topics seek the participation of small businesses in addressing problems related to utilization of coal and natural gas to produce power, and to the recovery of oil and natural gas.  Many of the topic offerings indirectly support the DOE’s FutureGen initiative, a program to demonstrate hydrogen production and carbon sequestration.  The objectives of FutureGen are to produce hydrogen at $4/MMBtu, sequester 100% of the carbon-dioxide, and produce electricity with zero emissions at less than a 10% increase in cost.

For additional information regarding the Office of Fossil Energy priorities, click here.

TOPICS:

             13. Capture and Sequestration of Carbon

a)  Advanced Technologies for Monitoring, Mitigation, and Verification

b)  Advanced Separation and Capture Techniques for CO₂

c)  Non-Carbon Dioxide (Non-CO₂) Greenhouse Gas Reduction

d)  Risk Assessment for Geologic Sequestration

14. Environmental Technology Innovations and Controls for Fossil Energy Facilities

a)  Economical Sorbents for Mercury Removal from Coal-Fired Power Plants

b)  Water Usage in Electric Power Production

c)  High Volume Utilization of Coal Combustion By-Products

d)  Development of Robust Sensor Networks for Intelligent Control of Advanced Power Generation Systems

15. Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Balance-of-Plant (BOP)

a)  Low-Cost High-Efficiency Cathode Air Blowers

b)  Low-Cost High-Temperature Heat Exchangers

c)  DC-AC Inverter with Reactive-Power-Management Functionality

d)  Novel Energy Storage Devices

16. Coal Gasification and Combustion Technologies

a)  Novel Concepts in Gasification

b)  Novel Concepts in Air Separation (Non-Cryogenic Non-Membrane)

c)  Hydrogen Production and Storage

d)  Surface Modification of Alloys for Ultrasupercritical Coal-Fired Boilers

17. Oil and Natural Gas Technologies

a)  Oil and Gas Drilling

b)  Small Bore "Microhole" Drilling

c)  Methane Hydrates

d)  Advanced Diagnostics and Modeling

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