Multi-energies in the United States: discovering our research and development work in the field of CCS

Thierry Phuc-Tien, R&D Project Manager, USA

“When I talk about my work, people often have the image of a little character with a butterfly net chasing after CO₂ molecules. It's very fun and I wish it could be so simple. My project is looking at technologies to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. In the past, the activities of the U.S. R&D Center were focused on Exploration and Production activities. A large part of the team is moving towards renewable energies such as wind and obviously on the CO₂ Capture, Utilization and Storage. At TotalEnergies, the short-term ambition for Carbon Capture and Storage is to operate at least 10 million tons of CO₂ per year by 2030. So the idea is to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. The priority is energy efficiency, renewable energies and CO₂ capture for point sources. But there will always be some residual emissions and hard-to-abate emissions and this is where Direct Air Capture could be a solution. For example, I am managing a project named ACO₂RDS and the objective is to develop an adsorbent to capture CO₂ from dilute sources and we are screening thousands of existing materials and millions of hypothetical materials, and it will be impossible through an experimental approach. So we are working hand in hand with the numeric team, they are developing a machine learning tools and we are running the calculations here at the HPC Center in Houston.”

“For research, we're building this model where we can have our on-prem, for like some of the early testing. And then when we need more scale we can go out to our partners like the Department of Energy.”

“The Direct Air Capture technologies were developed like 10 or 20 years ago and they are very energy intensive, and the cost is completely unrealistic if we want to deploy at large scale. Three or four years ago, the U.S. government gave a very strong push which generates a tremendous financial support for Direct Air Capture. The challenge of Direct Air Capture is to develop a disruptive and innovative solution so we can have a real step change.”

“Hey yoga, how are you?”

”We do have multiple external partners. For example, we are working with the University of Alberta in Canada, a University of Kentucky in the U.S., but we are also working with startups and other industrials and other research centers.”

“That sounds very nice.”

“Thank you so much, Yoga.”