Three members of the TOUGH development team (Yingqi Zhang, Nic Spycher, and Stefan Finsterle)—scientists from the Energy Geosciences Division—participated in Lab-Corps, a six-week entrepreneurial boot camp, or “cohort”, facilitated by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which aims at accelerating the transfer of clean energy technologies from national laboratories to the…
Read More
Berkeley Lab will lead the Watershed Function Scientific Focus Area (SFA) to quantify how perturbations to mountainous watershed—floods, drought, fire and early snowmelt—impact the downstream delivery of water, nutrients, carbon, and metals. Researchers will observe and model watershed response to perturbations over seasonal to decadal timeframes, and from genome to watershed scales. The Department of Energy (DOE) Office of…
Read More
Earlier in June, the Department of Energy announced the selection of two Brine Extraction Storage Test (BEST) field projects that will test enhanced water recovery technologies for their potential to produce useable water from carbon dioxide (CO2) storage sites. The projects are set to receive funding managed by the Department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory’s (NETL)…
Read More
Berkeley Lab hosted the Kick-Off Workshop on May 18-20, 2016 for a new phase of the DECOVALEX Project, which is an international research and model comparison collaboration, consisting of a number of nuclear waste management organizations and regulatory authorities with several contributing research teams.
Read More
Berkeley Lab scientists in the Energy Geosciences Division (EGD) are conducting a study commissioned by California’s oil field regulating agency — the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources — to examine possible links between oil field wastewater injection and earthquakes. The research team is led by Bill Foxall, and includes Preston Jordan and Corinne…
Read More
Energy Geosciences Division Director Jens Birkholzer was recently named the Chairman of the DECOVALEX Project, which is an international research and model comparison collaboration, consisting of a number of nuclear waste management organizations and regulatory authorities with several contributing research teams. DECOVALEX which stands for DEvelopment of COupled models and their VALidation against EXperiments, has…
Read More Jens Birkholzer, hydrogeologist and Division Director of Energy Geosciences, has joined the editorial board of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control (IJGGC) as the Associate Editor for CO2 geological storage. As an associate editor, Birkholzer will ensure that the scientific quality and impact of the journal remains high. His research interests in evaluating the…
Read More
This past July, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Honored the memory of Paul. A. Witherspoon (Earth Sciences Division first Director, 1977-1982), by announcing a new midcareer award, the “Paul A. Witherspoon Mid-career Lecture in Hydrologic Sciences.” The goal is to recognize outstanding contributions in the hydrologic sciences by a midcareer scientist (within 6 to 20…
Read More
Savannah River National Laboratory has just released this video showing how they have developed an innovative remediation method for groundwater radioactive contaminants at the Savannah River Site. (The Savannah River Site is a national nuclear weapons site that shut down in the 1950s.) Their method has improved capture of contaminants, and at substantially lower cost than the prior approach.…
Read More
Berkeley Lab and the California Council on Science and Technology (CCST) publicly released (on July 9) the final Volumes II and III of a peer-reviewed independent scientific assessment that discusses how hydraulic fracturing and acid well stimulation could affect water, atmosphere, seismic activity, wildlife and vegetation, and human health in California. The Berkeley Lab science…
Read More