Danny Rice: Yes, Hey Ryan. This is Danny. Yes, so there’s really — I mean, there’s a few pieces on the permitting piece. There’s permitting at the state level and there’s permitting at the federal level. And both of them apply to NET Power Projects for a variety of applications. I think, let’s start on the subsurface piece, and then we’ll move to the grid, and then we’ll move to the air. So starting below ground, almost all states that have oil and gas activities today control primacy over Class II, so primarily enhanced oil recovery. And so that permit process is it state by state dependent, but it’s very quick. You’re talking about less than 12 months. In some of the states, could be a matter of months. And so as you look at Project Permian, for example, we’re already tied into Oxy — we’ll be tied into Oxy’s CO2 network where they already have existing EOR operations.
And so for us and why we really like Project Permian, while it’s not going to be indicative of the true potential of what NET Power can do to decarbonize the grid when we go into Class VI permits geologic sequestration areas. But what it does is it isolates and eliminates the risk of that permitting process for Class II because we already have permits in the infrastructure in place to make it happen. When you look at Class VI, Class VI is an interesting one because right now, only two states in the United States have Class VI primacy, North Dakota and Wyoming. And they’re issuing Class VI permits really, really quick — less than a year versus where the EPA is at, which is for all other states, which could be three to five years. Now the EPA is kind of in reactive mode responding to a massive influx of new permit applications for Class VI.
So they’re really playing catch-up trying to just remove this bottleneck in their approval process. I think the EPA’s goal, as they’ve publicly stated, is to be able to get it down to less than three years. And I think they’re targeting two years for that permit process from initial submissions through approval. And so that’s going to be fantastic on the subsurface side, if they can get it down to that level. But I think ultimately, the EPA is actually encouraging every single state that’s looking at sequestration within their borders to take primacy of our Class VI. And I think you’re going to see NET Power play an active role in helping those states that wouldn’t otherwise be pursuing primacy for Class VI will be the ones to work with them to help push them to file for that primacy just because we might be the only source of captured CO2 within those borders that would necessitate primacy over Class VI.
So we see classic times coming down across the board. It stays with the EPA and certainly it gets down to less than 12 months. In most instances, if states take primacy over it. On the interconnect side, again, the process is different from each grid system. There’s six major grid systems in the US. ERCOT, the processes is fairly fast compared to some of the other ones. That’s another reason why, Project Permian is where it is. We’re already going through the interconnect process where the ERCOT’s right now. So that’s not going to be a gating item in COD of the Project Permian. But if you look at some of these other states, there’s a lot of bottleneck within their interconnect queue. And so again, it just requires proper planning. It could be a couple of years in some of these states to get an interconnection.
I think if we were talking about trying to get these projects online in ’24, ’25, like a lot of these renewable guys, it would be problematic, but certainly not… And then the last thing on the air, and then I’ll get to the international piece. This is probably one of the most unique features of NET Power that we don’t really talk about because everybody when they think about air quality, people associate that with CO2, but that’s really atmosphere quality. And so yes, NET Power essentially eliminates all CO2 from power generation, which is so differentiated, but we don’t have any NOx because we don’t let nitrogen into the combustion chamber. We don’t have SOx because this is natural gas and it’s not coal, so there’s no sulfur. So it can’t be oxidized.
And we don’t have any particulate matter. And so when you look at those three criteria air pollutants, we don’t have any of them. And so within in the eyes of the EPA and the things that they regulate, which are those criteria air pollutants, we don’t have them. So we’ll be able to get just a minor source permit on the air piece, which is so differentiated versus any carbon emitting plant in the world today. I think when you go internationally, the permitting process is actually a whole lot faster. And it’s mostly just because most of these the nation states and the entities within these states are all kind of controlled by the country. And so you have the national energy company, which also owns the national oil company, which also owns the surface and the subsurface in the whole permitting process.
