Photo Credit: Southern Company Photo The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and NETL have renewed an agreement with Southern Company to operate the National Carbon Capture Center (NCCC), setting the stage for expansion at the DOE-sponsored facility into new areas of research to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel-based power plants, and to advance carbon dioxide (CO2) utilization and direct air capture (DAC) solutions.

NETL will demonstrate how local business partners and educational institutions throughout the Mountain State can connect with the Lab’s various resources and programs during the 2020 West Virginia Governor’s Energy Summit, which has the theme of “Connecting Communities Through Energy.”

NETL is marking National Energy Awareness Month this October by recognizing the Lab’s contributions to the critical role of energy production in national prosperity and security, especially during the national challenges this year. Electricity is a crucial element of the nation’s coronavirus pandemic response, fueling emergency medical care, sanitation and clean water systems, manufacturing sectors, intranet infrastructure and many other areas.  

Next week’s DOE-NETL 2020 Virtual Integrated Project Review Meeting will feature the nation’s leading experts in the field of developing cost-effective carbon capture technologies for the fossil energy power-generation sector.

NETL’s Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES), a center of excellence for the identification, synthesis, optimization and analysis of innovations to meet the nation’s growing energy needs, is the winner of the prestigious 2020 R&D 100 award, which recognizes the developers of the 100 most technologically significant products introduced into the marketplace in the last year.

NETL will soon share its analyses and insights regarding the increasing use of the nation’s natural gas resources with the Washington & Jefferson College Center for Energy Policy and Management (CEPM). CEPM has invited the NETL Systems Engineering and Analysis directorate to participate in a webinar to provide a technical discussion on the increasing use of natural gas in energy generation, which was largely made possible by the Shale Revolution of the past decade that saw the United States undergo a transition from a primarily coal-based to natural gas-based power system.

A ground-breaking NETL project that converts feedstocks of domestic coal into graphene, a material that can be used to build stronger roads and bridges and manufacture various high-tech products, received a prestigious R&D 100 award for being among the 100 most technologically significant innovations introduced into the marketplace in the last year.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) will award up to $1.5 million to winning innovators in a prize challenge to support FE’s SMART (Science-informed Machine Learning to Accelerate Real Time Decisions in the Subsurface) initiative.

Caption: Conventional heating works from the outside in, while microwaves provide rapid, selective heating on a molecular scale.NETL researchers are leading the way on a new frontier of reaction chemistry

Don’t miss out on next week’s DOE-NETL 2020 Virtual Integrated Project Review Meeting. It’s your opportunity to discover how the nation’s leading scientists and researchers are making advancements in transformative power generation to use fossil fuels in innovation ways to produce reliable and cleaner electricity. The week also will feature an alloy development and life prediction panel discussion. Topics include superalloys and heat resistant alloys designed to perform under extreme conditions in highly efficient fossil energy plants.