NETL selected six projects last year to receive a total of nearly $1 million to create a sustainable supply chain of critical minerals (CMs), including rare earth elements (REEs), which are crucial to the development of clean energy and national defense technologies. These projects have since made great strides toward their objectives, including drafting a report to provide insights into consumption and price data, characterizing midstream REE concentrates, and conducting a value analysis to determine the recoverable value of REEs from acid mine drainage (AMD).

NETL researchers presented the Lab’s work on new laser-based optical sensors that have the potential for use in subsurface fluid management, among other applications, during the 2022 National Lab Accelerator (NLA) Pitch Event, held Wednesday, Nov. 16, in Palo Alto, California.

NETL researchers have created a compact, portable device that can be used to detect cobalt at low concentrations in liquids, such as process streams from U.S. coal byproducts like fly ash and to prospect for cobalt in acid mine drainage – an innovation with financial, environmental and geopolitical implications for recovering the element that is currently produced mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, China and Zambia.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Nov. 7, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $30 million in financial assistance grants to Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) in South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington. These grants, distributed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management’s (EM) Minority Serving Institutions Partnership Program (MSIPP), will help develop highly qualified science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students and foster a well-trained, technically skilled, and inclusive workforce.

NETL’s Charles Damianides, Ph.D., has received a 2022 Distinguished Alumni Achievement Award from the Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

After visiting several project sites in conjunction with NETL partner organizations in Kentucky, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Lab’s Point Source Carbon Capture Team gained valuable perspective to enhance their work on future carbon capture projects.

NETL experts are preparing to put quantum computing, a rising, powerful and promising new force for complex and fast problem solving, to work on key energy research topics leading to an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future. Quantum computing uses the principles of quantum mechanics to sift through large numbers of possibilities to extract solutions to complex problems at speeds exponentially higher than conventional computers with less energy consumption.

David C. Miller, Ph.D., has been named chief research officer of NETL.

A case study conducted by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) NETL examined the performance and cost of solvent-based direct air capture (DAC) system configurations that remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) researchers across the nation are accelerating efforts to solve challenging production, transportation and storage issues to put hydrogen (H2) to work as a low-carbon fuel option for a range of critical energy applications. NETL is a key part of that overall effort with work to advance surveillance and monitoring technologies for underground H2 storage facilities that ensure maximum safety.