who's who

Houston organization names annual energy industry award winners

ALLY Energy's eighth annual GRIT Awards and Best Energy Workplaces named its winners this week across nine categories plus several people's choice winners. Photo via ALLY Energy/LinkedIn

A Houston company identified the top players in the energy industry — with this year's honorees being recognized for their growth, resilience, innovation, and talent.

ALLY Energy's eighth annual GRIT Awards and Best Energy Workplaces named its winners this week across nine categories plus several people's choice winners.

"The GRIT Awards honor those who have shaped the industry and continue to inspire future generations. These winners have demonstrated extraordinary leadership and dedication to driving innovation across the energy landscape," says Katie Mehnert, founder and CEO of ALLY Energy, in a news release.

According to ALLY, submissions are open to the public and a group of judges evaluate and decide on each of the GRIT Award finalists, which were announced in September, as well as the winners.

The 2024 winners were:

  • The Professional Award - Obianuju Igbokwe, technology strategy consultant at SLB
  • The Executive Award - Sandhya Ganapathy, CEO of EDP Renewables North America
  • The Entrepreneur Award - Tara Karimi, co-founder and chief science officer at Cemvita
  • The Sustainability Award - Maru Williams, ESG manager at Chevron
  • The Best Affinity Group, Employee Resource Group, or Business Resource Group Award - Occidental Petroleum, FRIEND
  • The Best Energy Team Award - 1PointFive, Direct Air Capture
  • The Top Energy Voices Award - Kithairos Solutions
  • The Best Energy Workplaces Award - EDP Renewables North America
  • The Best Energy or Climate Startup Award - Syzygy Plasmonics

The People's Choice awards, decided by online judging, named winners, including:

  • The Best Affinity Group, Employee Resource Group, or Business Resource Group Award - Baker Hughes, Multicultural ERG
  • The Best Energy Team Award - ADNOC Offshore, Project Light PMO
  • The Best Energy Workplace Award - Baker Hughes
  • The Best Energy or Climate Startup Award - Solaires Enterprises Inc.
  • The Top Energy Voices Award - Sarah Magruder, Founder and President of Savvy Oil & Gas Consulting
In addition to these winners, the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Awards honorees were recognized too. The recipients were:
  • Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental
  • Jan E. Odegard, consultant and former executive director of Ion
  • Sivasankaran "Soma" Somasundaram, president and CEO of ChampionX

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A View From HETI

Researchers Rahul Pandey, senior scientist with SRI and principal investigator (left), and Praveen Bollini, a University of Houston chemical engineering faculty, are key contributors to the microreactor project. Photo via uh.edu

A University of Houston-associated project was selected to receive $3.6 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy that aims to transform sustainable fuel production.

Nonprofit research institute SRI is leading the project “Printed Microreactor for Renewable Energy Enabled Fuel Production” or PRIME-Fuel, which will try to develop a modular microreactor technology that converts carbon dioxide into methanol using renewable energy sources with UH contributing research.

“Renewables-to-liquids fuel production has the potential to boost the utility of renewable energy all while helping to lay the groundwork for the Biden-Harris Administration’s goals of creating a clean energy economy,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in an ARPA-E news release.

The project is part of ARPA-E’s $41 million Grid-free Renewable Energy Enabling New Ways to Economical Liquids and Long-term Storage program (or GREENWELLS, for short) that also includes 14 projects to develop technologies that use renewable energy sources to produce sustainable liquid fuels and chemicals, which can be transported and stored similarly to gasoline or oil, according to a news release.

Vemuri Balakotaiah and Praveen Bollini, faculty members of the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are co-investigators on the project. Rahul Pandey, is a UH alum, and the senior scientist with SRI and principal investigator on the project.

Teams working on the project will develop systems that use electricity, carbon dioxide and water at renewable energy sites to produce renewable liquid renewable fuels that offer a clean alternative for sectors like transportation. Using cheaper electricity from sources like wind and solar can lower production costs, and create affordable and cleaner long-term energy storage solutions.

“As a proud UH graduate, I have always been aware of the strength of the chemical and biomolecular engineering program at UH and kept myself updated on its cutting-edge research,” Pandey says in a news release. “This project had very specific requirements, including expertise in modeling transients in microreactors and the development of high-performance catalysts. The department excelled in both areas. When I reached out to Dr. Bollini and Dr. Bala, they were eager to collaborate, and everything naturally progressed from there.”

The PRIME-Fuel project will use cutting-edge mathematical modeling and SRI’s proprietary Co-Extrusion printing technology to design and manufacture the microreactor with the ability to continue producing methanol even when the renewable energy supply dips as low as 5 percent capacity. Researchers will develop a microreactor prototype capable of producing 30 MJe/day of methanol while meeting energy efficiency and process yield targets over a three-year span. When scaled up to a 100 megawatts electricity capacity plant, it can be capable of producing 225 tons of methanol per day at a lower cost. The researchers predict five years as a “reasonable” timeline of when this can hit the market.

“What we are building here is a prototype or proof of concept for a platform technology, which has diverse applications in the entire energy and chemicals industry,” Pandey continues. “Right now, we are aiming to produce methanol, but this technology can actually be applied to a much broader set of energy carriers and chemicals.”

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