Notice of Intent to issue a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) on behalf of DOE's Office of Fossil Energy (FE) entitled "Water Management For Thermal Power Generation". | DE FOA 0002430

Opportunity Information: Apply for DE FOA 0002430

The Department of Energy (DOE), through the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and on behalf of DOE's Office of Fossil Energy (FE), issued this Notice of Intent (DE-FOA-0002430) to signal that it planned to release a full Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) titled "Water Management For Thermal Power Generation" (FOA number DE-FOA-0002399). The core idea is to accelerate practical, near-term water treatment solutions that can be deployed at thermal power and other fossil-related sites by moving beyond lab work into engineering-scale prototype design, construction, and operation. The program is structured to push technologies closer to commercial readiness by requiring real-world testing and by explicitly tying the technology to an operating host site and an identifiable market pathway.

A central feature of the opportunity is the requirement to form teams that include (1) a fossil asset owner or operator and (2) a water treatment technology developer. DOE is trying to close the common gap between promising treatment concepts and actual deployment by pairing technology innovators with the people who run plants, manage compliance risk, and make capital decisions. Projects are intended to demonstrate integrated prototypes at a scale large enough that performance, operability, and the requirements of a full commercial build-out can be understood with fewer assumptions. The funding instrument type is expected to be a cooperative agreement, which typically means DOE expects substantial involvement during the project in areas like milestone review and technical direction.

Strategically, the FOA sits at the "energy-water nexus," reflecting DOE's view that electricity reliability, water availability, and environmental performance are tightly linked. The notice emphasizes that water scarcity is already shaping operations and planning in many parts of the United States and is expected to become more challenging. At the same time, the power sector is transitioning toward lower-carbon generation, which creates new operational pressures on remaining dispatchable plants (especially coal and natural gas) to run more flexibly while also decarbonizing. The notice highlights that decarbonization pathways such as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) and fuel switching (including toward hydrogen or biomass) can increase the water intensity of fossil-based power and related infrastructure. That combination of water constraints and water-intensifying decarbonization options is presented as the main driver for investing in improved water management technologies.

The opportunity is also explicitly aligned with DOE's Water Security Grand Challenge, particularly Goal 3: achieving near-zero water impact for new thermoelectric plants and significantly reducing freshwater use intensity across the existing fleet. In practical terms, DOE is looking for projects that can reduce overall water intensity, reduce water-related environmental impacts (including discharges and residuals), and support reliability and flexibility of coal-, gas-, and hydrogen-fueled generation. Another recurring theme is making the economics work: the notice acknowledges past efforts where innovative high-salinity treatment concepts were hard to commercialize due to weak market incentives, and it points to value creation (including saleable by-products) as a way to strengthen the business case.

The technical scope is broad, but it is not generic "water treatment" in the abstract. Proposals are expected to target water streams that are difficult, high-impact, or operationally constraining in fossil-related contexts, and to show how the treatment system fits into an actual asset. The notice mentions potential alignment with zero liquid discharge (ZLD) goals, where treating and recycling internal plant waters can improve drought resilience and reduce or eliminate wastewater discharge. Examples of in-plant effluents identified as relevant include cooling tower blowdown, flue gas desulfurization (FGD) wastewater, and other internal process water streams, as well as leachates associated with ash ponds, landfills, or other residual management units.

DOE also encourages concepts that integrate non-traditional water sources "within the fence" of a power plant or fossil asset. These non-traditional sources can include brackish groundwater, municipal wastewater, oil and gas produced water, mining-impacted waters, ash pond waters, and agricultural wastewaters, but the key requirement is that the treatment is directly integrated with the fossil asset rather than being a standalone municipal or industrial water project. The notice recognizes that these integrations often face real business-case hurdles, yet it suggests that plants with lower capacity factors may have off-peak energy available that could be leveraged to run treatment systems, potentially improving overall asset utilization.

A third eligible source category is brines associated with CCUS operations. These are high total dissolved solids (TDS) waters brought to the surface as part of subsurface CO2 injection and storage activities. The notice references earlier FE efforts that targeted treatment of extremely saline waters (on the order of 180,000 ppm TDS) and explains that commercialization was difficult at the time due to limited incentives. In this new framing, DOE points to the possibility that as CCUS scales up, treated brines could become a valuable water source either for the plant, for industrial uses, or potentially for broader regional uses (with the notice citing examples like agriculture and municipal water). Importantly, while integration with a power plant is allowed, CCUS brine projects do not necessarily need to be physically integrated with the originating plant because storage sites may be far from the emission source.

The notice anticipates one main Area of Interest: "Water Treatment for Low-Carbon Fossil Power Generation." Projects are expected to start with a conceptual study tied to a specific host site and then progress through engineering design to construction and operation of an engineering-scale prototype under realistic conditions. DOE is not only asking whether a technology can treat a water stream, but whether it can be operated reliably in the field, what it costs, what gaps remain, and how it will reach the market. For that reason, the notice states that projects will need to include a techno-economic analysis, a technology gap assessment, a technology maturation plan, and a commercialization plan, all aimed at translating prototype results into a credible pathway for commercial deployment.

In terms of technology approaches, the notice leaves room for a wide range of solutions, explicitly mentioning membranes and other innovative technologies while not limiting applicants to those. It also highlights selective removal concepts where specific constituents are extracted, producing a treated water stream that can be reused at the plant or diverted for another beneficial purpose. A major emphasis is on creating additional value streams where possible by producing saleable by-products or commodity materials that help offset treatment costs. Examples listed include salts, rare earth elements, acids and bases, and limestone, as well as approaches that address legacy environmental challenges in a way that improves project economics.

There are also clear boundaries. Freshwater treatment is explicitly out of scope, so proposals need to focus on challenging internal effluents, non-traditional waters integrated with a fossil asset, or CCUS brines. The FOA is intended to apply across coal, natural gas, and hydrogen-related power generation contexts, and it welcomes both retrofits of the existing fleet and greenfield applications. Finally, this specific posting is a Notice of Intent rather than the FOA itself, meaning it was provided for informational planning purposes and DOE stated it was not soliciting comments through the notice. The posting lists an unrestricted eligible applicant category (subject to any additional eligibility language in the eventual FOA), identifies the administering organization as DOE NETL, and notes an anticipated cooperative agreement structure for awards under the full announcement.

• The Department of Energy, National Energy Technology Laboratory in the energy, environment, science and technology and other research and development sector is offering a public funding opportunity titled "Notice of Intent to issue a Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) on behalf of DOE's Office of Fossil Energy (FE) entitled "Water Management For Thermal Power Generation"." and is now available to receive applicants.
• Interested and eligible applicants and submit their applications by referencing the CFDA number(s): 81.089.
• This funding opportunity was created on Oct 30, 2020.
• Applicants must submit their applications by Dec 15, 2020. (Agency may still review applications by suitable applicants for the remaining/unused allocated funding in 2026.)
• Each selected applicant is eligible to receive up to $2.00 in funding.
• Eligible applicants include: Unrestricted (i.e., open to any type of entity above), subject to any clarification in text field entitled Additional Information on Eligibility.

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