Berkeley engineers partner with Siemens Energy on $3.7M DOE project to explore direct air capture for carbon sequestration

The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded Siemens Energy, Inc., and partners Constellation Energy, UC Berkeley and Battelle a $3.7 million grant to explore the feasibility of a multi-technology direct air capture (DAC) hub that will extract carbon dioxide directly from the air to help combat climate change.

According to the DOE announcement, made Aug. 11, the Teras DAC project is “aligned with the targets of the DOE’s Carbon Negative Shot initiative and is intended to create a credible path to enable the eventual construction of the proposed DAC hub.” The DAC hub setup would include a physical installation in the Midwest, while the analysis, design and digital twin simulations will be performed at UC Berkeley. Digital twins are digital replicas of physical systems that run in real time or faster than the physical counterpart in order to control and optimize operation in the field.

The DAC system will be anchored around Siemens Energy’s large-scale solid sorbent capture technology, with smaller deployments of next-generation capture technologies planned.

“This project seeks to accelerate the deployment of industrial-scale direct air capture technologies and to build the foundation for regional carbon networks to sequester and utilize CO₂,” said Tarek Zohdi, principal investigator of the study and Berkeley Engineering’s associate dean for research.

“With this partnership, the UC system will have the opportunity to contribute to the area of climate change mitigation on a massive scale,” he added. “We are excited to share our resources and expertise in modeling and simulation of complex systems, in order to advance this research.”