Berkeley Lab scientists are addressing the scientific questions required to scale up technologies that prevent carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere, sequester carbon, and convert carbon into biofuel and useful products, including new ways to process biomass into bioproducts.

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Developing new strategies to capture carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and store it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or in products.

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Combining theory, lab, field, monitoring, and simulation approaches to safely and effectively implement geologic carbon sequestration.

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Focusing on research to transform CO2 and electrons into sustainable aviation fuels.

 David Alumbaugh, a person with bobbed length brown hair wearing glasses and a white collared shirt with gray stripes, photographed against a beige wall.

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, a person with medium-length dark hair wearing a dark top with dangling earrings, photographed against a dark gray backdrop.

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, a person with short gray hair wearing glasses and a gray blazer over a blue and white checkered collared shirt. Photographed against a beige wall.

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.

 A chrome-colored methane storage tank featuring the Mango Materials logo rises above a rooftop, with a cloudy blue sky and rainbow in the background.

Mango Materials is using methane-eating bacteria to make polymers that can replace carbon-intensive plastics. Berkeley Lab scientists helped refine their production process.

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.

 An illustration of factory smoke stacks emitting clouds of pollution, with three large yellow arrows pointing downward against a blue grid background. Aerial photograph of the FLEXLAB complex Christina Castanha, a person wearing a light colored hat, green shirt, and brown pants, collecting soil samples outdoors for a deep-soil warming experiment. Kristin Persson, a brown-haired person wearing a black dress, points at her electrolyte genome 3D visualizations. Evening traffic in downtown Los Angeles. Evening view of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, with downtown San Francisco in the background..