Director’s Corner

by Brian Anderson, Ph.D.

Every day, NETL personnel are hard at work to deliver integrated solutions for a sustainable energy future. Across the Lab, our team is developing technologies to address a wide range of energy and environmental challenges to ensure affordable, abundant and reliable energy while managing carbon across the full life cycle. 

In the newly released third-quarter accomplishments report, we highlight a few of our recent successes that include:  

• A new pipeline planning database to increase the safety of transporting CO₂ from where it’s captured to where it can be stored or converted.  
• A first-of-its-kind field-deployable technology that can accurately sense the presence of natural gas as an early warning system for infrastructure leaks. 
• A significant milestone toward lower-cost power generation at the STEP pilot plant, which is demonstrating the operability of the supercritical CO₂ power cycle and showing the potential for producing a lower cost of electricity in relevant applications. 

We also celebrated several well-earned awards that recognize the excellence of our NETL team: 

• Environmental engineer Natalie Pekney, who leads research to mitigate methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells, was awarded a 2022 Arthur S. Flemming Award. 
• Researcher Lingxiang Zhu, who specializes in development of membranes to capture CO2 from industrial sources, received the 2023 Young Membrane Scientist Award at the North American Membrane Society. 
• Specialist Chris Bond, whose work significantly reduced the complexity of transferring the Lab’s technologies to the private sector and increased the number of agreements executed, was recognized as the “Best in Region” for the Mid-Atlantic region by the Federal Laboratory Consortium. 

These successes are only a few of many accomplishments that showcase the critically important work we’re doing to meet clean energy goals that call for a net-zero carbon emission electricity sector by 2035 and economy-wide net-zero emissions by 2050. I invite you to read more about these and other efforts in this report. (PDF version available here.)