Van Ness Feldman client, Skyonic Corporation, will open an industrial chemical plant next week that will capture the carbon dioxide emitted from a coal-fired cement plant and use it to produce chemicals like sodium bicarbonate and hydrochloric acid by reacting it with rock salt, in lieu of traditional methods of mining.  Members of Van Ness Feldman’s government relations and federal funding teams undertook major outreach efforts on behalf of Sykonic to help secure a $28 million grant from the Department of Energy to build the plant and helped with negotiating the cooperative agreement for the project. According to Skyonic President and CEO, Joe Jones, “[the plant is] the largest carbon-capture plant in the world that isn’t on the pump-it-in-the-ground cycle.”  For more information about the project, please see the article in the New York Times.