James Tour of Rice University has received funding to support his energy transition research. Photo via rice.edu

A Rice University chemist James Tour has secured a new $12 million cooperative agreement with the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center on the team’s work to efficiently remove pollutants from soil.

The four-year agreement will support the team’s ongoing work on removing per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) from contaminated soil through its rapid electrothermal mineralization (REM) process, according to a statement from Rice.

Traditionally PFAS have been difficult to remove by conventional methods. However, Tour and the team of researchers have been developing this REM process, which heats contaminated soil to 1,000 C in seconds and converts it into nontoxic calcium fluoride efficiently while also preserving essential soil properties.

“This is a substantial improvement over previous methods, which often suffer from high energy and water consumption, limited efficiency and often require the soil to be removed,” Tour said in the statement.

The funding will help Tour and the team scale the innovative REM process to treat large volumes of soil. The team also plans to use the process to perform urban mining of electronic and industrial waste and further develop a “flash-within-flash” heating technology to synthesize materials in bulk, according to Rice.

“This research advances scientific understanding but also provides practical solutions to critical environmental challenges, promising a cleaner, safer world,” Christopher Griggs, a senior research physical scientist at the ERDC, said in the statement.

Also this month, Tour and his research team published a report in Nature Communications detailing another innovative heating technique that can remove purified active materials from lithium-ion battery waste, which can lead to a cleaner production of electric vehicles, according to Rice.

“With the surge in battery use, particularly in EVs, the need for developing sustainable recycling methods is pressing,” Tour said in a statement.

Similar to the REM process, this technique known as flash Joule heating (FJH) heats waste to 2,500 Kelvin within seconds, which allows for efficient purification through magnetic separation.

This research was also supported by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, as well as the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and Rice Academy Fellowship.

Last year, a fellow Rice research team earned a grant related to soil in the energy transition. Mark Torres, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences; and Evan Ramos, a postdoctoral fellow in the Torres lab; were given a three-year grant from the Department of Energy to investigate the processes that allow soil to store roughly three times as much carbon as organic matter compared to Earth's atmosphere.

By analyzing samples from the East River Watershed, the team aims to understand if "Earth’s natural mechanisms of sequestering carbon to combat climate change," Torres said in a statement.

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This article originally ran on InnovationMap.

Two Rice University researchers just received DOE funding for carbon storage research. Photo by Gustavo Raskosky/Rice University

Research team lands DOE grant to investigate carbon storage in soil

planting climate change impact

Two researchers at Rice University are digging into how soil is formed with hopes to better understand carbon storage and potential new methods for combating climate change.

Backed by a three-year grant from the Department of Energy, the research is led by Mark Torres, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental and planetary sciences; and Evan Ramos, a postdoctoral fellow in the Torres lab. Co-investigators include professors and scientists with the Brown University, University of Massachusetts Amherst and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

According to a release from Rice, the team aims to investigate the processes that allow soil to store roughly three times as much carbon as organic matter compared to Earth's atmosphere.

“Maybe there’s a way to harness Earth’s natural mechanisms of sequestering carbon to combat climate change,” Torres said in a statement. “But to do that, we first have to understand how soils actually work.”

The team will analyze samples collected from different areas of the East River watershed in Colorado. Prior research has shown that rivers have been great resources for investigating chemical reactions that have taken place as soil is formed. Additionally, research supports that "clay plays a role in storing carbon derived from organic sources," according to Rice.

"We want to know when and how clay minerals form because they’re these big, platy, flat minerals with a high surface area that basically shield the organic carbon in the soil," Ramos said in the statement. "We think they protect that organic carbon from breakdown and allow it to grow in abundance.”

Additionally, the researchers plan to create a model that better quantifies the stabilization of organic carbon over time. According to Torres, the model could provide a basis for predicting carbon dioxide changes in Earth's atmosphere.

"We’re trying to understand what keeps carbon in soils, so we can get better at factoring in their role in climate models and render predictions of carbon dioxide changes in the atmosphere more detailed and accurate,” Torres explained in the statement.

The DOE and Rice have partnered on a number of projects related to the energy transition in recent months. Last week, Rice announced that it would host the Carbon Management Community Summit this fall, sponsored by the DOE, and in partnership with the city of Houston and climate change-focused multimedia company Climate Now.

In July the DOE announced $100 million in funding for its SCALEUP program at an event for more than 100 energy innovators at the university.

Rice also recently opened its 250,000-square-foot Ralph S. O’Connor Building for Engineering and Science. The state-of-the-art facility is the new home for four key research areas at Rice: advanced materials, quantum science and computing, urban research and innovation, and the energy transition.

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Houston researchers earn $3.3M in DOE funding to develop safer underground power line installation

going under

Researchers from the University of Houston — along with a Hawaiian company — have received $3.3 million in funding to explore artificial intelligence-backed subsurface sensing system for safe and efficient underground power line installation.

Houston's power lines are above ground, but studies show underground power is more reliable. Installing underground power lines is costly and disruptive, but the U.S. Department of Energy, in an effort to find a solution, has put $34 million into its new GOPHURRS program, which stands for Grid Overhaul with Proactive, High-speed Undergrounding for Reliability, Resilience, and Security. The funding has been distributed across 12 projects in 11 states.

“Modernizing our nation’s power grid is essential to building a clean energy future that lowers energy costs for working Americans and strengthens our national security,” U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm says in a DOE press release.

UH and Hawaii-based Oceanit are behind one of the funded projects, entitled “Artificial Intelligence and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Real-Time Advanced Look-Ahead Subsurface Sensor.”

The researchers are looking a developing a subsurface sensing system for underground power line installation, potentially using machine learning, electromagnetic resistivity well logging, and drone technology to predict and sense obstacles to installation.

Jiefu Chen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UH, is a key collaborator on the project, focused on electromagnetic antennas installed on UAV and HDD drilling string. He's working with Yueqin Huang, assistant professor of information science technology, who leads the geophysical signal processing and Xuqing Wu, associate professor of computer information systems, responsible for integrating machine learning.

“Advanced subsurface sensing and characterization technologies are essential for the undergrounding of power lines,” says Chen in the release. “This initiative can enhance the grid's resilience against natural hazards such as wildfires and hurricanes.”

“If proven successful, our proposed look-ahead subsurface sensing system could significantly reduce the costs of horizontal directional drilling for installing underground utilities,” Chen continues. “Promoting HDD offers environmental advantages over traditional trenching methods and enhances the power grid’s resilience.”

Aramco partners to demonstrate compact carbon capture technology for gas turbines

dream team

Integrated energy and chemicals company Aramco has signed a collaboration agreement with Carbon Clean and SAMSUNG E&A in an effort to showcase new carbon capture technology.

The technology demonstration will be used to deploy Carbon Clean’s novel CycloneCC technology to capture CO2 from natural gas turbine exhaust streams containing approximately 4 percent CO2, according to Aramco.

Carbon Clean, which U.S. headquarters are located in Houston at the Ion, boasts technology that has captured nearly two million tons of carbon dioxide at almost 50 sites around the world. Aramco’s U.S. headquarters is also in Houston.

“The potential for CycloneCC in the US and Houston area is huge,” Aniruddha Sharma, chair and CEO of Carbon Clean, previously shared with EnergyCapital. “It is optimised for low to medium scale industrial emitters and recent Rice University research on the US Gulf Coast, for example, found that it is well suited to 73 percent of Gulf Coast emitters.”

The modular CycloneCC unit has a 50 percent smaller footprint compared to conventional carbon capture processes. The CycloneCC technology is estimated to reduce the total installed cost of carbon capture systems by up to 50 percent compared to conventional systems if successful. The goal is to also maintain process efficiency even at low CO2 concentrations. CycloneCC’s performance is achieved through two process intensification technologies, rotating packed beds (RPBs) and Carbon Clean’s proprietary APBS-CDRMax solvent.

“Its compact, modular design should be easily integrated with gas turbines, delivering high performance carbon capture in an industrial setting where space is typically limited,” Sharma says in a news release.

The engineering, procurement and construction of the plant will be done by SAMSUNG E&A .The unit will be installed on the sales gas compressor turbine exhaust gas stack,which can provide performance data under real-world conditions.

“Aramco and Samsung Ventures are investors in Carbon Clean, so we’re proud to deepen our relationship through this partnership,” Sharma adds. “This first-of-a-kind deployment capturing very low concentrations of CO2 is a key milestone in scaling up and commercializing CycloneCC.”

In September, Carbon Clean also announced a deal with PETRONAS CCS Solution to collaborate and evaluate Carbon Clean’s carbon capture and storage technology with Carbon Clean's CycloneCC tech. Last year, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. (ADNOC) selected Carbon Clean for a carbon capture project in Abu Dhabi.