Tuesday, 28 October, 2025 / Edition 82

We’ve all heard the phrase working “Smarter, not harder.” In just about any field, efficiency is king (As is coffee—because YOU are more efficient with coffee 😉). Any way we can do more with less, it’s a win for all involved. This week, we will look at two examples of innovations aimed at increasing efficiency. Let’s dig in!

Sarah Compton

Editor, Enspired

Big Tech + Ag Facility = CCS Project in Google's Latest Collab

Daniel Pawter/Shutterstock.com

Google is generating power from natural gas but coupling it with local carbon capture and sequestration to lower the overall carbon footprint.

Getting ducks in a row: The project brings together Google and climate tech firm Low Carbon Infra (LCI). The site is already primed for carbon storage.

Project development: LCI is the developer on the project. Its investor, I Squared Capital, is at the helm of the deal. LCI saw a huge opportunity to permanently sequester over 2 million tons of CO₂ emissions per year.

The facility:

• The facility is an existing industrial facility run by agricultural company Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), which has nearly a decade in the business of storing CO2 from ethanol production.

• The Broadwing Energy facility in Decator, Illinois is slated to have more than 400 megawatts of generating capacity, and Google has agreed to buy most of those electrons to offset its AI and data center power needs.

• The project is expected to capture roughly 90 percent of its own CO2 emissions and permanently store them underground.

Quid pro quo: The sequestered carbon is going to take a trip about a mile underground to be stored in ADM’s adjacent EPA-approved Class VI sequestration facilities, and ADM will get steam from the natural gas plant to help run its operations.

How it works: According to Broadwing Energy’s website, the process works like so:

• The heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) captures exhaust heat from the turbine, and the flue gas from the HRSG is diverted to the carbon capture plant, where CO₂ will be removed from the gas stream.

• The quencher cools the flue gas from the HRSG to support efficient removal of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the absorber.

• The absorber is where the cooled flue gas passes through a solution, which absorbs CO₂.

• The regenerator heats the solution to release the absorbed CO₂.

• The CO₂ compressors compress the CO₂ from the regenerator into a liquid form to be permanently sequestered deep underground nearby.

Not all sunshine and roses: ADM is both a grain producing juggernaut and CO2 sequestration extraordinaire, but it has not been without its own hiccups.

• There was a grain dust explosion in July

• CO2 injection operations were paused in October due to a potential movement of brine between different formations at roughly 5,000 feet, which could have led to a leak of stored CO2.

• There was even a death at the facility with 15 other workers injured.

• All these episodes were linked to ADM’s safety lapses, but they have not been fined by OSHA, who concluded, “Luckily, the employees and employer had recognized the fire condition prior to the explosion event and evacuated the building. This action avoided exposure to the catastrophic effects of the explosion.”

Concerns about ADM aside, pairing a natural gas power plant with an onsite carbon capture process seems like a win-win: abundant reliable power with minimal CO2 emissions.

The need for geoscientists here is clear, especially with ADM’s potential leak incident indicating a possible lack of understanding of subsurface conditions.

To learn more about the project, go here or learn about it on Google’s blog here.

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Find Them Fast: Critical Minerals and Rare Earth Elements

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The need for critical minerals (CM) and rare earth elements (REEs), which are essential materials in tech such as solar panels, smart phones, and computers, is high and likely to grow.

Rare…but not rare:

• The crux of the problem is in the name, “rare,” which is a bit of a misnomer in terms of raw relative abundance but more related to the economic accumulation of CMs and REEs in one location that can be profitably extracted.

• Locating and extracting the materials are also a huge part of what makes REE and CM procurement rather expensive.

Driving the news: A partnership of the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), Ramaco Resources, and Weir International seeks to transform and improve the efficiency of these processes. In short, they want to make REEs and CMs easy to find and quantify.

Background: The partnership began in 2018 and is funded by the DOE’s Technology and Commercialization Fund.

How will they do it? Bright lights and machine learning. Gabriel Creason, a geo-data scientist at NETL gave a high-level overview of the process: “We are combining our proven method of predicting geologic deposits with handheld X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and machine learning for near-real-time characterization of a site’s critical mineral potential.”

The machine-learning technology was developed by NETL’s Geoscience Artificial Intelligence & Assessment (GAIA) research group.

From data to deposits: The method is a classic data-driven model informed by physics—specifically geologic and geospatial knowledge-data guided by REE accumulation mechanisms—that systematically assess and identify areas of higher enrichment.

How it works:

• Gather and inventory available knowledge and data.

• Group regions together based on shared geologic characteristics.

• Calculate the potential enrichment score, which describes and quantifies areas where how favorable past conditions were for REE accumulation.

• Perform spatial integration or predictions and observations.

The latest move forward in the project gives a framework that can guide and inform the data acquisition process.

Get it fast: The technology breaks down traditional barriers to resource characterization like limited field data and slow, expensive lab analyses by enabling real-time resource detection and quantification.

Power to the people: The project’s lead researcher summed up the motivations behind the work saying, “Putting the power of rapid detection and resource prediction in the hands of the commercial sector helps unlock new sources of CMs.”

To read the release about the work from NETL, go here.

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