Episode 41: From Research to Results: Decades of Lignite Innovation

So one thing I wanted to go through is over the years, we've given tens of millions of dollars through the industrial commission and then with industry partners have been spent on a variety of areas trying to move this industry forward.

Some of the main ones that kind of stick out are carbon capture, critical minerals, new uses for lignite.

So I want to take some time to go through each one of those topics a little bit and pick each one of your brains on those.

So I'll start with carbon capture, which we've been working on a long time.

So in the research and development on the CO2 storage in North Dakota, it really got a healthy start in the early 2000s with the PCOR partnership.

What was your role in that project in the early years of the carbon capture development? And Mike Jones.

Well, I can start with that.

My role at the ERC, a lot of it was interfacing with industry because from the very beginning, as Mike mentioned, we were not focused on just generating new data.

We wanted to find ways to actually make it valuable.

And so it was practical research that leads to changes in the world is really what we focused on.

We had a saying that you take a fuel and you understand that well enough that you can match it with a system, whether it be a boiler or whatever, and that was always what we tried to do.

So in this case, we want to change something very significantly.

We want to talk about eliminating an emission of CO2 not necessarily because it's bad, but because it has other potential uses.

And so we went into a discussion, and I think it was something that we were able to get a lot of people in D.C. to buy into, is that it's utilization.

It's not just carbon capture and storage.

It is valuable.

It has many things that you can do.

We talk about the Bakken phase two of trying to crack the code.

I remember early on I was talking to a gentleman at the research center who is an expert in supercritical fluid extraction.

And his name is Steve Hawthorne.

I asked him, I said, tell me, what's the potential here? He said, well, you know, we're getting somewhere under 10% of the oil out today.

What can you do in the lab if you try to extract the CO2? He says, I can get all of it.

So it tells you that the bar is very high.

Now it's a whole different game working in a laboratory and working in a natural environment.

But it tells you that that's not the limiter.