Leah Arnold, IT manager within NETL’s Laboratory Operations Center, has an extensive career in public service marked by resilience and a knack for embracing new practices and technologies to excel in a rapidly changing work environment. Arnold has been the supervisor of the Lab’s enterprise applications area since she joined NETL in September 2012. She also held several interim leadership roles over the years, supporting the IT Director and the Cybersecurity team. Over that time, the Lab’s federal IT staff doubled, and Arnold’s team tripled in size. Arnold explained that her team’s work is significant on many levels. “First, risk to NETL is minimized since business knowledge is maintained within federal staff,” she said. “In addition, enterprise business system planning now informs strategic direction on priorities. Lastly, technical debt is reduced, and business needs are being met.” 

On more than one occasion, colleagues have suggested that NETL’s McMahan “Mac” Gray may soon need a larger display case to hold the numerous honors and awards he has received for advancing cutting-edge solutions to complex energy issues. The research chemist joined NETL in 1986 and has served as principal investigator for multiple innovations, including NETL’s basic immobilized amine sorbent (BIAS) technology — a breakthrough discovery capable of capturing greenhouse gas emitted by power plants that earned Gray a prestigious R&D 100 award. 

International Women in Engineering Day is celebrated across the globe June 23 to raise awareness about the women pursuing engineering and transforming the world with their achievements. NETL is proud to recognize its women engineers who work to address the nation’s critical energy needs. A few of the many women engineers at work in NETL labs, their specialties, and their views on the work they do include: Djuna Gulliver, Ph.D. — NETL Research Scientist

NETL, in partnership with California-based Cerebras Systems Inc., is embracing new, efficient computer architecture that can accelerate research project simulations to make a clean energy economy a reality. Cerebras is one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) hardware manufacturers. Working in conjunction with Cerebras, who designed the revolutionary wafer-scale engine (WSE) to tackle tough AI problems, NETL developed the Wafer-scale engine Field equation Application programming interface (WFA). A programming interface allows different computer programs to communicate, and the WFA is enabling newer, more efficient means of generating simulation modeling data that will produce results faster while reducing the amount of energy consumed. The WFE is over 1,500-time more energy efficient per unit computing as compared to current state-of-the-art research computing resources.

Researchers at NETL and the University of Wyoming report that using brackish water — water that is not suitable for drinking or irrigation because it contains between 1,000 and 35,000 parts per million of dissolved solids — to cool power plants can reduce freshwater consumption by 94% to 100%. The results of the study were reported in a paper published online by Nature Portfolio and available here.  Thermoelectric power plants boil water to create steam, which then turns turbines that generate electricity. After the steam has passed through turbines, it must be cooled into water before it can be reused to produce more electricity.  In the United States, 90% of electricity comes from thermoelectric power plants that require cooling.  Nicholas Siefert, Ph.D., a research mechanical engineer at NETL, said power plants are a major source of water consumption in the United States.

High school and middle school teams that won NETL’s annual regional Science Bowl competitions for West Virginia and western Pennsylvania made strong showings at the national contest held April 27-May 1 in Washington, D.C. Suncrest Middle School Team 1 and Morgantown High School Team 1 earned trips to compete in the National Science Bowl after winning the 2023 West Virginia Regional Science Bowl. Also located in Morgantown, Suncrest finished second in its opening day of round-robin competition at the national contest and advanced to double-elimination play. Suncrest went on to win its first and third matches in double elimination before it was eliminated. Morgantown High School took fifth out of eight teams in its divisional round-robin competition, just one win away from advancing to the double-elimination portion of the contest. North Allegheny Senior High School Team 1 and North Allegheny Marshall Middle School Team 1 won the 2023 Western Pennsylvania Regional Science Bowl.

NETL will host an extended residency for a Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) doctoral candidate in chemical engineering under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program. CMU’s William Strahl is one of 87 awardees from 58 different universities who will conduct research at 16 DOE national laboratories. Strahl earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Brigham Young University with a minor in computer science before arriving in Pittsburgh to study at CMU for his doctorate. The goal of SCGSR is to prepare graduate students for science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) careers by providing graduate thesis research opportunities through extended residencies at DOE national laboratories. The program represents a pipeline for highly skilled scientific and technological workforce development.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques, NETL researchers are exploring a way to treat water that seeps through coal combustion waste using a sorbent synthesized from fly ash, itself a coal combustion waste ─ a development with implications for improving the costs of managing future waste sites. According to the University of Kentucky Geological Survey, the United States produces 100 to 130 million tons of combustion wastes annually at coal-fired power plants and in many cases, those materials are disposed of in impoundment ponds. Leachate is liquid pollution that can escape from impoundments, and it often contains chemicals that are bad for the environment. Sorbents are materials used to recover substances through adsorption. Sorbents can adsorb harmful substances in leachate. New sorbents can be expensive and time-consuming to design and create.

Earth Day is an annual event that has been celebrated since 1970 and closely aligns with NETL’s vision to develop sustainable energy solutions and protect the environment for future generations. In celebration of Earth Day, observed tomorrow, April 22, NETL proudly announces the winners of its annual Earth Day Poster Contest. This year’s contest drew approximately 950 entries from elementary students (grades 1-5) at schools near NETL’s sites in Albany, Oregon; Morgantown, West Virginia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who used their creativity and imaginations to showcase their favorite ways to protect the environment. This year, students were asked to design their posters around the theme, “Invest in Our Planet. What will you do?” NETL is proud to share the first-, second-, third- and fourth-place winning entries at each grade level. Click here to see the winning posters.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) today announced nearly $47 million in funding for 22 research projects to advance the development of new and innovative measurement, monitoring, and mitigation technologies to help detect, quantify, and reduce methane emissions across oil and natural gas producing regions of the United States.