Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Logo

Projects

Inactive

Abrupt Climate Change

DOE’s Climate Modeling Program initiated back in 2008 an area of research in Abrupt Climate Change Modeling aimed at articulating the thresholds, nonlinearities and fast feedbacks in the climate system with a focus on abrupt climate change, incorporating causal mechanisms into coupled climate models and testing the enhanced models against observational records of past abrupt climate change.

Funded by DOE-SC-Biological and Environmental Research
Inactive

ARPA-E Microbial Electrocatalysis (Electrofuels)

As part of the DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) program for research on microorganisms that can produce liquid fuels without using petroleum or biomass, a Berkeley Lab-EESA team engineered strains of a common soil bacterium, Ralstonia eutropha, to produce drop-in replacements for gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel using only hydrogen and carbon dioxide as inputs.

harry beller
Funded by DOE-ARPA-E
Inactive

GEO-SEQ Project

The GEO-SEQ Project has two primary goals: to develop ways to improve predictions of injectivity and capacity of saline formations and depleted gas reservoirs, and to develop and test innovative high-resolution methods for monitoring CO2 in the subsurface.

Funded by DOE-FE-Office of Fossil Energy
Inactive

Large-Scale Hydrological Impacts of Geological CO2 Storage

If carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies are implemented on a large scale, the amounts of CO2 injected and sequestered underground will be extremely large. The figure above shows schematically the large-scale subsurface impacts that will be experienced during and after industrial-scale injection of CO2. While the CO2 plume at depth may be safely…

Abdullah Cihan
Funded by DOE-FE-Office of Fossil Energy
Inactive

Linking from Genomes to Ecosystem Function: An Annual Grassland Mesocosm Exploration

The ultimate goal of this completed research was to improve our ability to predict ecosystem response to climate change. Our starting assumption was that plants and microorganisms mediate terrestrial ecosystem response to global climate change. While there are many groups of organisms that are critical to ecosystem function, we employed the simplifying construct that plants and microbes are the primary mediators.

Margaret Torn
Inactive

Microbial Communities (JBEI)

The Microbial Communities research team prospects for new enzymes that can efficiently deconstruct lignocellulosic biomass. Group members take samples from such places as rain forest floors and composts. From these samples, specific microbes and enzymes are identified, isolated, and manipulated, and a suite of “omics” tools is used for genome-level community characterization.

Funded by DOE-SC-Biological and Environmental Research
Inactive

Ocean Biogeochemical Processes

Our main area of interest is the ocean's carbon cycle. As geochemists, we're interested in how carbon cycle processes influence the geochemical cycles of the 50 or so elements which exhibit nonconservative behavior in sea water. As earth scientists, we're concerned with the consequences of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. How will living systems respond to climate induced change in the ocean? How does the ocean naturally sequester carbon and how will this change in the future?