Eni in deal with US firm to develop fusion pilot project at MIT

Italian-headquartered energy company Eni and US-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems are to work together to accelerate the industralisation of fusion energy.

Through a framework agreement, CFS plans to leverage Eni's support to further develop magnetic confinement fusion technology over the next decade.

Projected to become the world's first magnetic confinement pilot plant with net production of fusion energy, they will work on project SPARC, which is in construction in collaboration with Massachusetts Institure of Technology and is scheduled to be operational in 2025.

According to CFS, SPARC will ultimately pave the way for ARC – the first commercial power plant capable of feeding electricity into the grid, which is projected to be operational in the early 2030s.

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“The collaboration framework...has great potential to advance our efforts on key global challenges and opportunities in transforming the energy landscape with a limitless supply of clean fusion energy,” said CFS chief executive Bob Mumgaard.

“This agreement underscores the key role existing energy companies play in accelerating fusion energy industrialization and the power of pairing of complementary organizations.”

In September 2021, CFS reached a major milestone with the successful test of its high-temperature superconducting magnet technology.

Now the company is working to accelerate the industrial development of ARC, as well as various projects now under development focusing on operational and technological support, technological development, and project execution through the sharing of methodologies.

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Eni's CEO Claudio Descalzi said: "We will see the first CFS power plant based on magnetic confinement fusion at the beginning of the next decade, with then almost two decades ahead to deploy the technology and achieve the energy transition goals by 2050.

"Having this technology at the industrial level, providing large quantities of zero carbon energy produced in a safe, clean and virtually inexhaustible way, will mean that we will contribute substantially to the energy transition challenge. This is why we are facing a potentially momentous technological breakthrough."

Eni first invested in CFS in 2018.

For Eni magnetic confinement fusion has a central role among the technologies that can lead the way to decarbonisation as it will for a virtually inexhaustible supply of emissions-free energy.