Today, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) announced plans to make more than $7 million in Federal funding available for cost-shared research and development to support the design, validation, and fabrication of a prototype carbon-based building. Funding opportunity announcement (FOA) DE-FOA-0002438, Design, R&D, Validation, and Fabrication of a Prototype Carbon-Based Building, seeks to solicit and competitively award research and development to validate carbon-based materials suitable for construction purposes. The FOA will include a single topic area that will focus on the design and build of a partial structure using carbon-based building materials.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) has announced up to $5 million in federally funded financial assistance for research and development projects under the funding opportunity announcement (FOA) DE-FOA-0002398, University Training and Research for Fossil Energy Applications. This funding opportunity will encompass two separate University programs, each with its own requirements and each with specific eligibility requirements. The two programs are University Coal Research (UCR) Program and Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Other Minority Institutions (HBCU-OMI) Program.

Innovative and reliable energy conversion systems are at the heart of America’s evolving energy infrastructure. They allow for the production of power, fuels and chemicals from both fossil fuels and renewable sources to provide the electricity that powers nearly every aspect of our daily lives. NETL’s role in advancing these systems ranges from designing novel experimental modeling tools to testing more efficient solutions to generating power and materials in ways that reduce environmental impact. In 2020, these advancements helped reduce time, cost and technical risk while enabling efficient operation to drive the energy systems of the future.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) have announced $3.3 million in Federal funding for cost-shared research and development projects under the Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) DE-FOA-0002399, Water Management for Thermal Power Generation. The FOA seeks to support the design, construction, and operation of engineering-scale prototypes of water treatment technologies for the nation’s existing and future fleet of thermoelectric power plants. It is envisioned that fossil asset owners or operators and technology developers will collaborate and advance near-term water treatment solutions that can be commercially deployed.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy (FE) and NETL has selected 14 projects to receive $8.7 million in Federal funding for cost-shared research and development under Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) DE-FOA-0002185, Coal-Derived Materials for Building, Infrastructure, and Other Applications, with the goal of fostering new uses for domestic coal resources. The National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) will manage the projects, which will support the Lab’s Advanced Coal Processing Technologies Program. The program is focused on improving coal feedstock for power production and steel-making, producing high-value solid products from coal, and alternative technologies to produce high-performance carbon material from coal.

Future novel hybrid energy systems could lead to paradigm shifts in clean energy production, according to a paper published last week in Joule. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) three applied energy laboratories — Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) — co‑authored the paper describing such integrated energy systems. Their effort outlines novel concepts to simultaneously leverage diverse energy generators — including renewable, nuclear, and fossil with carbon capture — to provide power, heat, mobility and other energy services. The historic collaboration between the nation’s Nuclear Energy, Renewable Energy and Fossil Energy labs aims to address a grand national challenge from an objective, holistic perspective.

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to algorithms that can — for a given set of human-defined objectives — learn, predict and make decisions, significantly increasing the speed and efficacy of decision-making. Most AI applications use machine learning (ML) to find patterns in massive amounts of data. The patterns are then used for making predictions. AI and ML have factored prominently in the Lab’s computational science and engineering (CSE) work in 2020 through the development of science-based simulation models, mathematical methods and algorithms and software tools required to address the technical barriers to the development of next-generation technologies. This research helps to generate information and understanding beyond the reach of experiments alone, saving time, money and materials.

Michele Ostraat, Ph.D. has been named chief operating officer of NETL. Ostraat joins NETL from a prestigious career in industry and academia, most recently serving as senior downstream research center leader at Aramco Services Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In this role, she championed the launch, growth and expansion of Saudi Aramco’s Global Research Center, with a focus on game-changing, high-risk/high-reward, long-horizon research portfolio and strong engagement with the scientific community and innovation ecosystem. Ostraat brings a strong record of leadership and expertise across energy, chemicals, defense, environment and health. Ostraat holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in chemical engineering from California Institute of Technology and a B.S. in chemistry from Trinity University.   As chief operating officer, Ostraat will provide strategic direction, leadership and management of NETL’s support functions and services, including cybersecurity and IT infrastructure.

NETL is home to some of the most talented scientists in the world, which was recently highlighted in an analysis published by the journal PLOS Biology naming several NETL researchers as among the top 2% of scientists in the world based on their career-long citation impact up until the end of 2019. Reviewing the databases of standardized citation metrics across a variety of scientific fields, a PLOS Biology article provided updated analyses assessing scientists for career-long citation impact up until the end of 2019. The data includes all scientists who, according to a composite index, are among the top 2% of scientists within their main subfield discipline (considering those that have published at least five papers) leading to a total of 6,880,389 scientists being assessed. NETL researchers identified in the PLOS Biology article are the current employees David E. Alman, Sofiane Benyahia, Ray Boswell, Yuhua Duan, Michael Gao, Randall S. Gemmen, Angela L. Goodman, Evan Granite, Mehrdad Massoudi, Ranjani V. Siriwardane, Dan Sorescu and Phuoc X. Tran, along with former employees David Maurice, Paul Ohodnicki, James Rawers, D.H. Smith and C.M. White.

In a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy’s (FE) National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA),  more than 1,200 hours of field testing was completed at the Wyoming Integrated Test Center (ITC), successfully demonstrating a process to create concrete masonry units (CMUs, or concrete blocks) using carbon dioxide (CO2) from power plant flue gas without the need for a carbon capture step. This demonstration is a success for the Carbon Utilization Program and illustrates the potential of a utilization technology to supply a large market with low-carbon concrete products while simultaneously reducing power plant CO2 emissions.