Central ND News

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced an initial award of $4.2 million to Project Tundra, marking the first installment of up to $350 million. These funds are part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law’s Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program, which aims to support community-informed integrated carbon capture, transport, and storage projects.

“This initial award really brings Project Tundra one step closer to being the first user of carbon capture utilization storage technology at a coal plant with on-site storage in the country, and how appropriate that it would be done in North Dakota,” said U.S. Senator Kevin Cramer (R-ND). “This project demonstrates our state’s ingenuity and decades of energy development, experience, and dominance. Obviously, more work lies ahead, but this is really welcome progress.”

Project Tundra aims to capture up to 4 million metric tons of CO2 annually from the Milton R. Young Station, a lignite coal-based power plant. The captured CO2 will be stored safely in geologic formations approximately a mile underground. The facility is expected to begin commercial operations in 2028.

In June 2023, Senator Cramer announced that Project Tundra had entered its final stage of development and congratulated efforts to deploy carbon capture at scale in North Dakota.