Accelerating the development of negative emissions technologies at scale for a future decarbonized economy.
Developing new strategies to capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and store it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or in products.
Combining theory, lab, field, monitoring, and simulation approaches to safely and effectively implement geologic carbon sequestration.
Developing simulation capabilities and a validation testbed to enable an economically sustainable, equitable, zero-carbon energy economy.
Focusing on research to transform CO2 and electrons into sustainable aviation fuels.
David Alumbaugh is a staff scientist who leads the Geological Carbon Storage Program. His research focuses on incorporating EM geophysical techniques into subsurface-characterization workflows, advancing multi-physics data analysis, and to a lesser extent, statistically based methods of fusing multi-physics data into geologic interpretations.
Bhavna Arora is a research scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division who leads the Carbon Removal and Mineralization Program. Her work focuses on developing tools to provide a scientific basis for solving diverse issues in earth and environmental sciences, such as water resource management, nutrient cycling, and achieving net negative emissions.
Jeffrey Long is a faculty senior scientist at Berkeley Lab and a professor of chemistry at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on the design and controlled synthesis of novel inorganic materials and molecules toward the fundamental understanding of new physical phenomena, with applications in gas storage, molecular separations, conductivity, catalysis, and magnetism.
Some parts of the world have so successfully produced inexpensive renewable electricity that occasionally, there’s a surplus. One possible use for that low-cost energy is converting carbon dioxide into fuel and other products using a membrane-electrode assembly. Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a new physics modeling approach to understand this promising technology and improve the efficiency of these assembly devices.
A key solution for carbon capture and storage is under our feet. We’re investigating the interactions between plants, microbes, and geological features in soil with the goal of using healthy soil ecosystems to pull carbon from the atmosphere and stash it underground for a long time, at a low cost. The Center for Restoration of Soil Carbon by Precision Biological Strategies, or RESTOR-C, brings together advanced technologies and diverse expertise of biologists, Earth scientists, and computational scientists from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico State University, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, and California State University Monterey Bay.
Berkeley Lab scientists are exploring ways to use carbon from industrial processes and convert it into useful products.