Bill Gates’ $1 billion Breakthrough Energy Ventures is investing in a host of startups developing technology that confront climate change. Among the first selected was Fervo Energy, a company hosted by EESA that is applying fracking techniques to the geothermal industry in the hope of converting far more of the planet’s latent heat into a source of…
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Marcelo J. Lippmann, a long-time fixture in the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area, passed away at his home in Berkeley, on September 10, 2018, after a long bout with cancer. Marcelo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1939, and received his Bachelor of Science in geology from the University of Buenos Aires in 1966.…
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A Cyclotron Road company hosted by EESA was part of a new $4.45 million award from the Department of Energy in support of its work to improve enhanced geothermal systems. Founded in 2017, Fervo Energy set out to overcome the technical challenges keeping geothermal energy from becoming a commercially viable form of clean energy in…
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Within the Department of Energy complex of national laboratories, the Geosciences Measurement Facility (GMF) at Berkeley Lab is distinguished by its ability to build, test, and deploy customized instrumentation and innovative data acquisition and telemetry solutions, which are enabling scientists to address some of the most critical Earth, energy and environmental challenges that we face.…
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A new instrument developed at the Geosciences Measurement Facility at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will help scientists working to identify ways to improve enhanced geothermal systems technologies to expand access to clean energy. Two of the instruments, called SIMFIP (Step-Rate Injection Method for Fracture In-Situ Properties), were installed in late May nearly 5,000 feet below…
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EESA Scientists were able to use the new synchrotron Infrared Nano Spectroscopy (SINS) capability at Advanced Light Source. Above: Diagrams of the setup of (a) the Germanium-hemisphere enhanced attenuated total reflection (Ge micro-ATR) and (b) the resonance enhanced SINS. Berkeley Lab scientists have identified a way to use machine learning to connect fine- and large-scale…
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Scientists from the Energy Geosciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have released the latest version of TOUGH (Transport Of Unsaturated Groundwater and Heat), a suite of software codes used worldwide to simulate nonisothermal multiphase flow and transport in fractured and porous media. TOUGH3 builds on the impressive legacy of its TOUGH predecessors, which…
Read More In February EESA Staff Scientist Tim Kneafsey helped escort leadership from the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy on a journey 4,850 feet below the ground. They toured Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF), an old South Dakota gold mine turned testing ground for studying how the process of extracting heat from rocks deep…
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Berkeley Lab scientists took a key role in publishing an exhaustive scientific report on the safety and long-term viability of underground natural gas storage in California, requested by Gov. Brown in the aftermath of the largest methane leak in U.S. history at the Southern California Aliso Canyon UGS more than two years ago.
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Pierpaolo Marchesini was one of four EESA postdocs to address the Meet your Postdoc session on Thursday, November 16, a brown-bag lunch series designed to acquaint senior scientists with EESA postdocs and their significant contributions to Berkeley Lab. Nkosi Muse sat down with Pierpaolo to discuss the work he does at Berkeley Lab using acoustic…
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