Colorado Funds Low-Purity Carbon Capture Pilot
The state grant backs a first industrial deployment of a capture method that skips costly purification.
Updated on Nov. 6, 2026 in Environmental
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Vycarb has been named recipient of a grant of up to $2,713,200 from the Colorado Energy Office under the state's Clean Air Program. The company will design, install and operate a carbon capture and storage system in Colorado. The development is at the funded-deployment stage, not yet an operating system.
Why it matters
The grant is the first carbon management award under the Clean Air Program and goes to a company whose approach skips the intermediate CO2 purification step that geologic storage normally requires. Grant recipients had to show additionality, meaning cuts beyond what law requires, which frames this as a test of whether state money can move capture technology onto industrial sites.
Vycarb's technology captures and stores low-purity CO2 without an intermediate purification step, and the company has demonstrated this using seawater. The $2,713,200 maximum grant is drawn from a $25 million Clean Air Program budget to be spent over six years. Performance figures for capture rate and storage volume were not provided in the source.
The players
Vycarb
A carbon capture company whose process stores low-purity CO2 without a purification step, demonstrated with seawater.
Colorado Energy Office
The Colorado state agency that issued the grant under the Clean Air Program.
The details
Carbon capture and storage systems pull carbon dioxide out of industrial exhaust and inject it underground for permanent storage. Conventional geologic storage requires the captured gas to be purified first, a costly step that makes most sites rarely economical. Vycarb's approach, by contrast, captures and stores CO2 that is still low in purity, removing that purification stage. The company demonstrated the process using seawater.
Timeline
Six years: the Clean Air Program's $25 million budget is spent over this period.
The Tech Race
Vycarb's award is the first Clean Air Program grant to a company capturing and storing industrial emissions. The program's additionality requirement means recipients must cut emissions beyond legal minimums, placing this project among early state-funded attempts to commercialize lower-cost capture.
The system will first be deployed at an operating industrial site in Colorado, so the effect reaches residents near that facility before any broader rollout. No installation date or operating timeline has been announced.
The takeaway
Watch for the announced installation date and first operating data from the industrial site, which will show whether low-purity capture performs at scale. The program's six-year spending schedule gives a timeline to track against.
Further reading
For more on the state's climate funding, see Environmental coverage of Colorado.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Carbon Herald.
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