EERC urges continued research funding as carbon capture, rare‑earth work and Bakken EOR pilots advance

Charles Gorecki, chief executive officer of the Energy & Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota, told the joint House and Senate energy committees that the EERC is expanding pilot and commercial‑scale work across carbon capture, enhanced oil recovery (EOR), rare earths, lignite‑derived carbon products and hydrogen supply chain analysis.

"For the record, my name is Charles Gorecki. I'm the CEO at the Energy and Environmental Research Center," Gorecki said, opening a broad presentation of the center’s activity and state‑level research partnerships.

Gorecki said the EERC had roughly $96.9 million in funding in fiscal year 2024, employed more than 240 staff plus student employees, and has completed 63 projects under its State Energy Research Center program. He asked the committees to consider extending and increasing State Energy Research Center support; Senate Bill 2143 would extend the program’s sunset and proposes raising the biennial allocation from $7.5 million to $10 million.

Gorecki highlighted several research outcomes already moving toward commercialization: the "polar bear" technology to reduce flaring by capturing low‑volume gas streams — which attracted more than $3 million in follow‑on funding and commercial interest from a North Dakota manufacturer — and lignite‑derived carbon products that produced synthetic graphite and graphene precursors for higher‑value applications. The EERC reported 15 inventions, 11 patent applications and six patents tied to State Energy Research Center work.

On critical minerals, the EERC and University of North Dakota partners are mapping and sampling North Dakota lignite and produced water for rare‑earth element concentrations. Gorecki said some local samples exceeded Department of Energy economic thresholds (about 300 parts per million) and that a Department of Energy core‑sampling program (CORE‑Centimeters) was expanding to include the Williston and Powder River basins.

Gorecki described a multi‑phase salt‑cavern study originally funded by the legislature. After drilling and coring, the EERC concluded the upfront subsurface work was feasible but that prior cost estimates had been optimistic. "From the work that we have done, it is estimated that the salt cavern development would probably be more like $550 million to develop a salt cavern," Gorecki said, adding that surface facilities could add tens of millions more and that commercial partners were not yet prepared to invest at that scale.

On carbon management and enhanced oil recovery, Gorecki reviewed long‑running state efforts in carbon capture and storage and presented new EERC analysis of the Bakken petroleum system. The EERC’s plausible development scenarios suggest that, with 5–20 million tons of CO2 available per year and pipeline/transport build‑out, incremental recovery in the Bakken and conventional fields could range from roughly 300 million to 1 billion barrels of additional oil over two decades, depending on capture availability and recovery efficiency. The analysis also showed a substantial gap between current point‑source CO2 volume in North Dakota (tens of millions of tons total) and the far larger CO2 volumes that would be required for widespread EOR in the Bakken.

Gorecki said the EERC is launching a larger Bakken EOR pilot backed by roughly $11.6 million in federal funding and substantial industry cost share to inject several hundred thousand tons of CO2 into multiple drill‑spacing units. The pilot’s goal is to quantify incremental oil recovery and the amount of CO2 stored and to validate workflows for commercial replication.

He also outlined the EERC’s work on utility‑scale questions: grid resilience and the impact of electrification, next‑generation lignite power with carbon capture, pipelines and pipeline‑integrity detection (the iPipe program uses satellites, drones, inline sensors and machine learning), and hydrogen hub planning. Gorecki described the Prairie Horizons (formerly Liberty Eve) hydrogen FEED study funded through the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority and cost share from Marathon Petroleum and TC Energy; that FEED concluded and returned unspent funds after partners determined the project did not yet meet their economic thresholds.

Senators and representatives pressed on technical and economic details: storage volumes per cavern and cost, hydrogen transport and embrittlement concerns, rare‑earth extraction methods, and how federal tax incentives affect EOR economics. Gorecki emphasized that policy levers matter: he cited the federal storage tax credit differences — roughly $85 per ton for dedicated geologic storage versus $60 per ton for storage associated with EOR — as factors that affect the financing gap for EOR projects.

Gorecki closed by urging continued investment in the State Energy Research Center, lignite, oil and gas, renewable research streams and the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority to sustain the state’s research‑to‑commercialization pipeline. "What you are doing is working," he told the committee, and asked lawmakers to continue supporting programs that move technologies from exploratory research to pilots and commercial deployment.

The committee recessed before proceeding to a North Dakota Transmission Authority briefing.