Director’s Corner

by Brian Anderson, Ph.D.

For more than 100 years, NETL has served the nation by developing technology solutions to energy challenges. Through the years, these challenges have included mine safety, zirconium production, oil and gas extraction, acid rain mitigation and more. Today, we’re facing an urgent need to address climate change, and NETL has been hard at work developing the technologies needed to mitigate this next energy and environmental challenge.

Our dedicated team of scientists and engineers is applying their world-class expertise to advance technologies like carbon capture, utilization and storage that can enable decarbonization of our energy production. We’re working through more than 600 partnerships and more than 900 research and development projects in all 50 states to bring the best talent to bear on enabling a carbon-free power sector by 2035 and a net-zero carbon-emissions economy by 2050.  

Together with our collaborators, we’re finding ways to empower a low-carbon economy through advanced technology that removes CO2 from both emissions sources and directly from the atmosphere while storing or using the resultant carbon. We’re advancing hydrogen technology that enables carbon-free hydrogen fuels for transportation, power generation and industrial processes. We’re developing transformational technologies to lower the cost of capturing CO2, and we’re reducing water consumption by addressing water quality, efficiency in use and sustainability in power generation. We’re also developing technologies that make recovering and distributing natural gas and oil safer, and we’re characterizing resources like gas hydrates to enable sustainable development.

All these efforts support our mission of driving innovation and delivering solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future:

• Ensuring affordable, abundant and reliable energy that drives a robust economy and national security, while
• Developing technologies to manage carbon across the full life cycle, and
• Enabling environmental sustainability for all Americans.

At NETL, science is a priority, and we’re applying our research and expertise to make a real impact on improving public health through clean energy production, protect our environment and ensure access to clean air and water. In this way, we’re working to be the nation’s premier energy technology laboratory, delivering integrated solutions to enable transformation to a sustainable energy future.

Although the challenges of climate change mitigation and decarbonization are great, I look forward with optimism to the solutions NETL will develop. We take great pride in our work, our service to the nation, and our ability to drive innovation and deliver solutions.