Originally written by Connor Griffith, WVNews
MORGANTOWN — When factoring in new leadership, new research, improvements to promising projects and partnerships to get new AAA technology into the hands of industry, the past year has been busy one for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory.
In November 2018, Brian Anderson joined NETL as its new director after previously leading the West Virginia University Energy Institute since that entity’s inception in 2014 where he was one of the leading voices for the development of the Appalachian Storage and Trade Hub.
As a whole, NETL operates three facilities in Oregon, Pennsylvania and in West Virginia just outside Morgantown where the lab employs some 600 researchers, technicians, scientists and other staff.
“NETL is a hidden jewel in our region and I don’t want it to remain hidden anymore,” Anderson said during the recent eighth annual Marcellus to Manufacturing Development Conference.
Looking back over the past 12 months, Anderson said it’s hard to single out what the agency’s single most significant accomplishment has been. However, one of the lab’s joint projects may bear fruit for the global energy market in the future.
“In December of 2018, NETL research and innovation centers with Petrotechnical Resources of Alaska and British Petroleum and the U.S. Geographic Survey completed a stratigraphic test run for locating a longterm hydrate production well in Alaska,” Anderson said.
“Why that’s significant is globally we identified the best location on the planet to do a longterm hydrate production test well and that was a project that was run by NETL and partners. If we look over the next century, methane hydrates as a global resource has a lot of interest in countries that don’t have natural gas resources on shore. Japan has a lot of interest in that space.”
Anderson said another highlight is the expanding work in the field of rare earth element extraction from unconventional sources.
These elements are vital in everyday technologies such as cell phones and green energy windmills. However, the world’s supply is controlled by Chinese industrial interests with the last conventional U.S. mine in California having closed long ago.
However, NETL scientists have discovered that they can be extracted from coal and even the byproducts of coal such as fly ash or acid mine drainage which in turn could create new incentives for visiting and cleaning up old mine sites.
“It’s a whole portfolio that includes in-house research at NETL, extramural work and project partners at West Virginia University and Penn State and University of Kentucky and a few others,” Anderson said. “That portfolio has been moving forward technology over the course of two years that advances in those technologies have not been seen for decades.”
Paul Ziemkiewicz directs the West Virginia Water Research Institute which has worked alongside NETL in extracting rare earth elements. He said as time has gone on, the purity of the actual minerals collected from acid mine drainage is only increasing and is expected to continue.
In the summer of 2018, NETL and its partners opened the Rare Earth Element Extraction Facility on the WVU Evansdale Campus to further explore this crucial research.
The lab has also made strides in the testing of better solvents used in capturing carbon dioxide. Proponents of CO2 capture have pointed out that the substance can be used in other applications such as the extraction of oil or even making products such as sodium bicarbonate, i.e. baking soda.
Looking ahead, Anderson said WVU’s Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Laboratory located at the Morgantown Industrial Park will soon commence the drilling of six additional rigs, which he expects to be completed in June. It is one of the lab’s partners in conducting various research in natural gas.
Even with all the advances in research and technology, NETL’s ultimate goal is to get these innovations into the hands of those who can deploy them on a wide scale. To achieve this, the Department of Energy has also devoted more of its Technology Commercialization Fund to assist NETL.
The fund was established by federal legislation back in 2005, but wasn’t implemented in its current form until 2016. The fund provides the money necessary to overcome the final hurdles in research and development, making it easier to establish the private partnerships that prove the economic viability of new designs.
“We, of course, undertake a lot of efforts to transfer technology developed here at the labs to commercial partners,” said Mike Knaggs, NETL’s assistant director for strategic partnerships. “We do that regardless, but TCF is helpful because it’s an additional bit of funding that provides a bit of focus to that last stage.”
He said the funding has provided funding for 10 projects per year since 2016 across the Department of Energy as a whole, but about half of those projects were NETL-related. He noted the funding is open for businesses both large and small and that participation, while risky, can allow smaller companies to achieve significant growth that would be much more difficult going solo.
What’s more, the funding also helps the lab scramble over the Valley of Death. In research context, the Valley of Death occurs when innovations or totally new technologies at a university or lab goes far in development, but the funding dries up because the development focus has been completed even though it has yet to be commercialized. As a result, some promising products never make it beyond the lab. As a federal institution, NETL’s role is that of research and development rather than commercialization.
To see this effort through, representatives of the Department of Energy’s Office of Technology Transfer visited the NETL facility in Morgantown to have a look at what’s under development and how the commercialization efforts might be improved.
One way or another, Anderson said he wants to make the most of NETL’s $1 billion budget to ensure the tech developed by its staff actually make it to the field and don’t fizzle out as laboratory exercises.