Inside Project Bison’s battle for clean power

In August 2023, the Department of Energy earmarked $12.5 million to fund engineering studies for Project Bison. When completed, the carbon removal and storage project in Wyoming would include the largest direct air capture facility in the world.

The project, led by CarbonCapture Inc., was considered a leading contender for a future round of federal direct air capture hub prizes. And the company, whichhad announced the project in late 2022, had already embarked on an ambitious community engagement program that it hoped could be replicated around Wyoming by other developers. Its storage partner, Frontier Carbon Solutions, had secured the requisite permits for carbon dioxide injection from the state.

But exactly a year after the announcement of the DOE grant, CarbonCapture announced it was leaving Wyoming behind, and pausing deployment on Project Bison. That pivot, CEO Adrian Corless wrote at the time, was primarily due to the company’s struggles obtaining access to clean electricity given “intense competition from data centers.”

That sudden and, for most, unexpected setback for Project Bison has thrown one of the most central challenges that DAC projects face nationally into sharp relief: how to power its notoriously energy-hungry processes in the midst of an artificial intelligence frenzy that is causing energy demand to spike so much that certain utilities are delaying coal plant retirement and even building new gas power. And while Project Bison may be the first casualty of that struggle, it’s unlikely to be the last. 

CarbonCapture initially assumed Project Bison would be powered by behind-the-meter renewable energy and storage, explained VP of business development Patricia Loria. But it turned out that renewables developers in Wyoming had a lot of caveats for powering the project, including up-front cash payments and flexible timelines that, given CarbonCapture’s size and balance sheet, the company couldn’t make work.

“Additionally, given where the energy storage landscape is, generally you’re still talking about having to be connected to the grid as well,” Loria added. “It really came down to whether or not we thought we could have access to the grid in a reasonable timeframe.” That connection, she added, needed to be close enough to a viable geological storage site to avoid the buildout of pipelines to transfer carbon dioxide from the energy-sucking DAC facility to the wells.

That ultimately wasn’t possible in Wyoming. “We couldn’t even get in a queue,” Loria said. The company initially believed they’d have access to several hundred megawatts by 2027. A further interconnection study changed that timeline to 2030, with the need to build out expensive substations and transmission.

“That’s when, for us, it just didn’t make sense to stay there,” Loria said.

Priority imbalances

CarbonCapture is far from the only DAC company facing the clean energy procurement challenge. In fact, the overall lack of interaction between the DAC industry and electric utilities is a serious problem for deployment nationwide, said Kajsa Hendrickson, director of policy at Carbon180.

“How on earth are we going to get these projects up and going if utilities aren’t involved in their resource planning?” Hendrickson asked. “One of the first questions we asked with Bison was, ‘how is it not the very first question you guys looked at when you were going into Wyoming?’”

Hendrickson said that in her experience, most utilities still aren’t familiar with DAC, even in regions where projects are planned. “That was a really big shock for me, because most utilities do integrated resource planning years in advance,” she said. “Granted, DAC at this point in time is small. But when you’re talking about potential megaton facilities, that is not a small energy ask.”

Moving forward, Loria said CarbonCapture hasn’t finalized the new location for Project Bison, but that the company is rethinking deployment sizes, to make sure projects are “right sized” for conversations with energy providers.

That said, they’re in the final stages of considering several locations, to determine which could move on the right timeline, she explained. The company is prioritizing “advantaged locations,” like those where point source projects are already established, or where other energy projects are already happening. 

For instance, CarbonCapture is “really supportive” of small modular nuclear for DAC, she added. (The industry may have some competition there, too, though; just this week, both Google and Amazon made moves to power data centers with SMRs.) 

The company’s initial engineering study grant from DOE is still under negotiation, and it’s not yet clear whether that grant could be applied to a different location. 

More impactful to the company’s decision on where to site Project Bison however, is the recent notice of intent, which Loria said “could create some changes in our strategy.” CarbonCapture still likes its chances of being selected for this round of DAC hub funding, she explained. DOE’s expected timeline for announcing funding winners — mid 2025 — has forced the siting timeline “in a good way.”

Despite it all, though, Loria doesn’t think DAC and data centers are fundamentally at odds. “It just so happens that a lot of our customers also use data centers, a lot of these big tech companies, so we are having a lot of those kinds of conversations together,” she said.

Hendrickson, at Carbon180, said the relationship between DAC companies and hyperscalers is “a bit of a double edged sword.”

“You have Microsoft, who may be putting all of the money in to build a data center but then who’s also buying CDR credits, and I think that makes for a really interesting conundrum,” she said. Tech companies may continue advocating for DAC facilities as their AI-related emissions rise, she added — and even the fact that those emissions increase may endanger ambitious decarbonization timelines is unlikely to stop them from building new data centers. 

“I think that puts them in a bit of a pickle,” she said. “It’s a pickle that we’re going to have to have regulation for, and have to work out at the federal level to address, because that’s not something companies are generally incentivized to make a decision on.”