When NETL’s Dirk Van Essendelft first met with leaders of the American artificial intelligence company Cerebras Systems Inc. in October 2019, he quickly realized the potential of the company’s groundbreaking Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) to revolutionize how the Lab modeled energy systems.

NETL has released the latest version of its award-winning Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges (MFiX) — a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software suite designed to shorten the time and reduce the cost associated with developing new power generation technologies.

NETL’s Deputy Chief Operating Officer Scott Tyner and Associate Director for Energy Efficiency and Manufacturing Joel Chaddock have been named by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) as 2025 Oppenheimer Science & Energy Leadership Program (OSELP) fellows — a year-long program of the National Laboratory Directors' Council (NLDC) designed to develop and empower exceptional leaders within DOE national laboratories. 

NETL Director Marianne Walck delivered key insights at the Digital Innovation Center of Excellence (DICE) 2025 Digital Engineering Conference at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), participating in a panel discussing critical and emerging technologies in the energy sector.

NETL’s Offshore Geologic Carbon Storage (GCS) Inventory, which contains information about permanent carbon dioxide (CO2) storage sites around the world, now allows users to more quickly locate relevant data through the new Offshore GCS Inventory Dashboard on the Energy Data eXchange® (EDX).

NETL is hosting 52 summer participants in four internship and fellowship programs at its research sites in Albany, Oregon; Morgantown, West Virginia and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

NETL and collaborators are developing a technology for more cost-efficient and time-saving production of graphite — a critical mineral needed for high-value energy and consumer products like batteries, cement and polymer composites — from various grades of petroleum coke, a solid, carbon-rich material byproduct of oil refining.

NETL researchers developed a new process for extracting economically and strategically vital rare earth elements (REE) and critical minerals (CM) from America’s coal fly ash at high quantities and offers several advantages over other available technologies.

NETL researcher Christina Wildfire, an expert in microwave technology and leader of the Lab’s Center for Microwave Chemistry, has been selected for a Bayh-Dole Coalition 2025 American Innovator Award for her work developing and helping to commercialize a microwave-assisted method of converting waste plastics to useful products.

Construction is underway on NETL’s Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Center in Morgantown, West Virginia — a state-of-the-art facility for advanced data and computing solutions related to applied energy challenges.