International Paper Vicksburg Carbon Capture Project

The International Paper Vicksburg Carbon Capture Project is a first-of-its-kind industrial carbon capture pilot located at International Paper’s containerboard mill in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Selected by the U.S. Department of Energy under its Carbon Capture Large-Scale Pilot Projects program, the initiative will install and test a carbon capture system based on RTI International’s non-aqueous solvent (NAS) technology to remove CO₂ from the mill’s power boiler flue gas and direct it to permanent geologic storage, targeting approximately 120,000 metric tons of CO₂ captured per year once deployed. The project is a collaboration among International Paper (host site), RTI International (technology developer), SLB (technology deployment partner), and Amazon (end-user supporting sustainability outcomes), and includes a federal cost share award of up to $88 million from DOE. Phase 1 involves a front-end engineering design (FEED) study, permitting, and preparatory work, with potential future phases advancing to construction and commercial operations if successful, providing data and insights to accelerate carbon capture adoption across the pulp and paper industry. The report highlighted management changes at International Paper has resulted in a re-evaluation of the host-site location and commitment by IPCO. RTI and the project team (STC, Amazon) have been working with IPCO to provide any requested information for their financial analysis. Beginning of Jan 2025, DOE asked the team to focus on securing an alternate host site and to stop work on other project tasks. Towards that goal, the team has been working to identify potential host site partners. To date, discussions have been focused on two entities that have expressed interest. The team met with the technical and business development members to discuss their participation, review project requirements and NAS technology development. Discussions are underway to get one of these two companies as an alternate new host-site partner on the team. We are likely to have schedule slippage from the host-site partner change and the RTI team will work to minimize this. One of the challenges with Large-scale pilot projects with CO2 offtake is the economics for CO2 transportation and sequestration (T&S). The small volumes of CO2 captured, which are at 120,000 TPY, makes the economics of the T&S uneconomical, unless these can be combined with CO2 streams from other projects. This has been a major issue for one of the entities to find a suitable host site.