A new NETL report explores opportunities to leverage high-performance alloy (HPA) research supported by DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy (FE) beyond coal-fired power plants and expand into industrial gas turbines as well as adjacent markets that require similar materials, such as the aerospace, industrial and chemical processing and automotive industries.

Today’s U.S. electricity grid consists of millions of miles of transmission lines that bring power to hundreds of millions of electricity customers across the country, so ensuring the security and reliability of this vital infrastructure is a top concern for NETL. The Lab continues to advance energy storage technologies for future deployment, but grid reliability also requires an understanding of the interaction between various sources of electrical power, especially during periods of increased demand like severe weather events.

An NETL-supported collaboration demonstrated favorable results that showed potential toward developing an environmentally benign and economically sustainable process for generating rare earth element (REE) products from domestic coal ash sources, marking a step forward in enabling a domestic supply of these critical materials.

Committed to its goal of developing new energy technologies while retaining environmental integrity, NETL manages a vast portfolio of carbon capture research and development projects that are successfully reducing costs to ensure the availability of clean, reliable and affordable power from America’s abundant domestic resources.

NETL-led research shows the possibilities and benefits of developing magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) power generation such as improved efficiency for fossil fuel power plants and reducing the costs of implementing carbon capture.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and NETL have selected 11 projects to receive approximately $17 million in federal funding for cost-shared research and development projects for carbon utilization. The projects will develop and test technologies that can utilize carbon dioxide (CO2) from power systems or other industrial sources as the primary feedstock.

The first of three webinar sessions hosted by NETL starting June 23 will detail the upcoming U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) InnovationXLab CarbonX Summit. Scheduled for Sept. 22-23 at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh, the InnovationXLab CarbonX Summit showcase DOE technologies and the Lab’s capabilities which are transforming the domestic energy economy by enabling value-added products, environmentally conscious storage, and economical carbon dioxide capture.

NETL expertise is finding new ways to transform coal and natural gas into chemicals, including the lightest element listed in the periodic table, to resolve a heavy burden for operators of the U.S. electricity grid system.

A groundbreaking NETL study demonstrated that machine learning (ML) and data analytics can be used to design next-generation alloys needed to operate fossil fuel-based power plants with greater efficiency and produce affordable electricity while lowering emissions of greenhouse gas.

Researchers at NETL are one step closer to solving one of the most difficult problems associated with developing post-combustion carbon dioxide (CO2) capture technology. The team has developed a new process to create a chemically bound, dual-layer membrane or sorbent that combines the benefits of high permeability and high selectivity – two material qualities that are usually mutually exclusive – to more effectively separate CO2 from nitrogen found in power plant flue gas.