To support the nation’s transition to renewable energy and the growing demand for battery production, there is an accelerating urgency for new ideas and innovative solutions. From March 8-9, Berkeley Lab hosted a National Energy Storage Summit to connect national and regional leaders across industries, government, and communities to encourage collaboration on tackling the challenges…
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More than half of earth’s freshwater comes from mountainous watersheds – areas of land that catch precipitation and drain to nearby streams, lakes, and rivers. These ecosystems provide services such as water filtration, nutrient cycling and carbon storage that can significantly impact the amount of clean, freshwater critical for energy production, agriculture, and municipal water…
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Living soil microorganisms are extremely powerful and incredibly diverse biogeochemical engines driving the turnover of organic matter in the terrestrial biosphere. However, it is not only in life that microbes control the future of the global carbon cycle and Earth system productivity. In fact, dead microbial biomass, or necromass, is one of the largest stocks…
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Through photosynthesis, the green leaves of vegetation use the sun’s energy to capture carbon dioxide (CO2), synthesize sugars, and thus sustain life on Earth. Globally, plants have been shown to photosynthesize more with increased atmospheric levels of this heat-trapping gas. But this CO2 fertilization effect (CFE) can be hard to determine without teasing out factors…
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As Programs Operational Analyst in the Energy Geosciences Division and co-founder of the Asian Pacific Islander Employee Resource Group (API ERG), Carol Chien’s efforts have been impactful in both EESA and Berkeley Lab’s employee community. The API ERG is a group dedicated to help API employees reach their full potential by establishing a support system,…
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Back in November 2020 when field research worldwide had more or less grounded to a halt due to COVID related travel restrictions, one team of EESA geoscientists was able to carry through with a key field investigation–and a complicated one at that. Conducted in underground rock laboratories, their work involves activating a geological fault to…
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This article appeared first at newscenter.lbl.gov The Salton Sea geothermal field in California potentially holds enough lithium to meet all of America’s domestic battery needs, with even enough left over to export some of it. But how much of that lithium can be extracted in a sustainable and environmentally friendly way? And how long will the…
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A few changes in leadership took effect on February 14 as described below. Susan Hubbard, the founding Associate Laboratory Director (ALD) for the Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA), left Berkeley Lab to begin a new role as the Deputy Laboratory Director for Science and Technology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) on March 1.…
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This article was originally published on the Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences website. By Elizabeth Ball As winter falls in a remote corner of Colorado, in a mountainous watershed on the Upper Colorado River, hundreds of sensors continue their work, day in and day out: forming a detailed quantitative picture of the watershed by collecting…
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Mike Whittaker, research scientist in the Energy Geoscience Division, is a co-founder of the Lithium Resource Research and Innovation Center-a group that researches how to satisfy the increasing lithium demand as renewable energy sources become essential to achieving net zero emissions. On January 19, Whittaker led a virtual event, “Critical Materials and Minerals (CMM) Town…
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