LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

Nov. 10, 2023


Net power

The NET Power Plant in La Porte, Texas, utilizes NET Power’s Allam-Fetvedt Cycle technology. It converts natural and renewable gas into zero-emissions power. The plant achieved first fire in May 2018, becoming the world’s first large-scale supercritical carbon dioxide power plant. Photo courtesy of: NET Power.

Backing up the power grid

It would be great if everyone could back up the intermittent power from wind and solar plants with energy stored as low-cost, zero-carbon hydrogen gas. But hydrogen can be hard to store.

But a closed-loop storage-plus-power system stockpiles renewable energy wherever it's needed. A German research team reported that storing energy as methanol can be cost-effective. The key is to integrate equipment producing hydrogen, methanol and electricity, all of which are being commercialized or are in industrial development. This also could help with the intermittent power challenge.

Research led by Jessica Wert, a power systems engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, found that U.S. states regularly experience periods of 48 hours or more where wind or solar resources fall well below seasonal norms. California, for example, experienced two dozen “solar resource droughts” between 1973 and 2022. In the same period, Iowa experienced 158 wind droughts, three of which lasted a full week.

Energy Central

Earthshot_decarbonization its best shot

LLNL will co-lead the “Center for Coupled Chemo-Mechanics of Cementitious Composites” (CM4) and will lead “Terraforming Soil,” both part of the Department of Energy Office of Science Energy Earthshot program.

Terraforming soil to ease climate change

The Terraforming Soil Energy Earthshot Research Center (EERC) may sound minor on the surface, but it is both major and critical to mitigating climate change.

While the United States’ 410 million acres of agricultural soils have lost a vast amount of carbon in the past century due to cultivation and erosion, there is clear potential to reverse this trend and actively manage agricultural lands with strategies that capture CO2 from the atmosphere.

The Terraforming Soil EERC at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will research new bio- and geo- engineered techniques to understand, predict and accelerate scalable and affordable CO2 drawdown in soils, via both organic and inorganic carbon cycle pathways.


earth science daily

More than 2.3 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere spent about a million years filled with a methane-rich haze; and this haze drove a large amount of hydrogen out of the atmosphere, clearing the way for massive amounts of oxygen to fill the air, known as the Great Oxidation event. Image courtesy of Francis Reddy/NASA.

A window to the past

Microfossils from Western Australia may capture a jump in the complexity of life that coincided with the rise of oxygen in Earth's atmosphere and oceans, according to an international team of scientists.

The findings provide a rare window into the Great Oxidation Event, a time roughly 2.4 billion years ago when the oxygen concentration increased on Earth, fundamentally changing the planet's surface. The event is thought to have triggered a mass extinction and opened the door for the development of more complex life, but little direct evidence had existed in the fossil record before the discovery of the new microfossils, according to the team that includes a Lawrence Livermore scientist.

When compared to modern organisms, the microfossils more closely resembled a type of algae than simpler prokaryotic life -— organisms like bacteria, for example — that existed prior to the Great Oxidation Event, the scientists said. Algae, along with all other plants and animals, are eukaryotes, more complex life whose cells have a membrane-bound nucleus.

More work is required to determine if the microfossils were left behind by eukaryotic organisms, but the possibility would have significant implications, the scientists said. It would push back the known eukaryotic microfossil record by 750 million years.

forbes

EnergyNow flow chart

Americans used more renewables to generate electricity than in previous years, according to the most recent energy and carbon flow charts produced by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Electrify everything everywhere

In our future economy, any economic value chain that can go from wind turbines to wires to energy services without going through molecules will win. It will be vastly cheaper. It will be vastly lower carbon. It will be vastly more efficient.

And the degree of electrification that’s possible and probable is likely to astound. This series digs through all of the energy requirements of a modern economy and point out the reasons why radical electrification of everything, everywhere, all the time is our future.

Let’s start with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory energy flows Sankey diagram. Most countries in the world have variants of this. The International Energy Agency maintains its own versions for the world. Most of them aren’t as good as the LLNL one. They are eye charts and they understate one of the big problems, rejected energy.

That’s the gray bars and big gray box. That’s energy that comes into the economy on the left from coal, nuclear energy, natural gas or renewables and then turns into waste heat that just evaporates into the sky. It’s a very clear indicator of inefficiency. We have been able to afford throwing away two-thirds of all energy in modern economies because fossil fuels are dirt cheap and we were able to use the atmosphere as a dumping ground without consequences.

In the future, we won’t be doing that. We’ll be making low-carbon electricity only on the left, and getting rid of the big gray bar of rejected energy from burning coal, gas and oil to make electricity. We won’t be making molecules like hydrogen or synthetic natural gas to burn for electricity because that will be vastly less efficient and so much more costly.


NIF capsule

A NIF fusion target contains a polished capsule about two millimeters in diameter, filled with cryogenic (super-cooled) hydrogen fuel. NIF uses capsules of plastic, diamond or beryllium.

LLNL offers a helping hand

Focused Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have signed a strategic partnership project agreement for LLNL to assist the American-German fusion company with developing and assessing the performance of isochoric compression target designs for inertial fusion energy.

Focused Energy’s approach is to use millimeter-scale plastic capsules, filled with a small amount of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, and driven by a laser to produce clean, safe and nearly inexhaustible energy in the future.

At LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), inertial fusion ignition and target gain greater than 1 were achieved in December 2022 — a historic breakthrough for the future production of clean energy. Under this contract, LLNL will use its codes and tools to help Focused Energy study and optimize target designs for achieving high compression in ischoric fuel assemblies required for fast ignition inertial confinement fusion.

"We are very pleased to have another renowned partner on board with LLNL to optimize the target design together," said Thomas Forner, CEO and co-founder of Focused Energy.

Computer with email graphic

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The Lab Report is a weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for the content in the links below.