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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Mack Kennedy received the Geothermal Special Achievement Award from the Geothermal Resource Council, one of the world’s preeminent geothermal associations, during its 41st Annual Meeting held in Salt Lake City, Utah. Kennedy was recognized for his outstanding contributions and dedication to developing the science and engineering needed for enhanced geothermal systems.
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By the time Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientists Barry Freifeld and Curt Oldenburg visited the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in December 2015, the SS-25 well blowout had been leaking natural gas into the air for more than six weeks. The notoriously strong winds at Aliso Canyon carried the natural gas and its…
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Thirty-five years ago, Berkeley Lab’s Earth & Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) scientist Patrick Dobson began his career as a graduate student by conducting field mapping, collecting fluid samples, and learning the ropes from local scientists at the Los Azufres geothermal field in Michoacán, Mexico. During his summer doing field work in Mexico, he met Berkeley Lab’s Marcelo Lippmann, who was attending a symposium on the Cerro Prieto geothermal field, the subject of a collaborative research project between the Lab (funded by the U.S. Department of Energy) and the Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE), Mexico’s state-owned utility. Now—after decades of leading geothermal exploration projects all over the world, including Indonesia, Central America, and South America— Dobson’s work has come full circle. Earlier this year, he spent two weeks in Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico as a Fulbright Specialist in geothermal research. Hosted by the Center for Scientific Investigation and Higher Education in Ensenada (CICESE), one of the main hubs for geothermal work in the country, Dobson met with Mexican researchers to share knowledge, identify areas of mutual interest, and explore potential areas of collaboration.
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Tim Kneafsey, a staff scientist at Berkeley Lab's Earth & Environmental Sciences Area, will lead a new $9 million project aimed at removing technical barriers to commercialization of enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), a clean energy technology with the potential to power 100 million American homes. Berkeley Lab will partner with seven other DOE national labs and six universities to develop field experiments focused on understanding and modeling rock fractures, an essential element of geothermal systems. Scientists will use the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in South Dakota to create small-scale fracture networks in crystalline rock 1,500 meters below ground.
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The California Energy Commission’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) program has awarded Berkeley Lab a total of $2.7 million for two projects that will be led by Energy Geosciences Division scientists, Kurt Nihei and Jonny Rutqvist make geothermal energy more economically attractive.
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Berkeley Lab is leading a SubTER project, called kISMET to develop an underground observatory and to conduct integrated experiments and geophysical imaging and focus on investigating stress measurement and fracture stimulation with borehole monitoring to characterize relations between stress, induced fractures, and rock fabric
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The California Energy Commission (CEC) has selected and recommended for funding two proposed projects by researchers Kurt Nihei and Jonny Rutqvist. Their projects will support the CEC’s efforts to meet the State of California’s 2030 climate commitment to use renewable energy resources for half of the state’s electricity by 2030. The state is currently on…
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“High Performance, Multidisciplinary Simulations for Regional Scale Seismic Hazard and Risk Assessments” is one of two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Earth and Environmental Sciences Area-led projects recently selected by the DOE Exascale Computing Project (ECP) to be funded at about $3M over the next three years. The project will be led by David…
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“An Exascale Subsurface Simulator of Coupled Flow, Transport, Reactions and Mechanics” is one of two Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Earth and Environmental Sciences Area-led projects recently selected by the Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) to be funded at $10M over the next four years. Berkeley Lab Principal Investigator, Carl Steefel…
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