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Funding to Support Consortium's Energy Research

Posted on: Monday, 28 April 2008, 03:00 CDT

By McCloud, Cynthia

Getting the most energy from coal while doing the least damage to the environment That's what West Virginia University, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh will spend the next two years and $26 million doing.

The three schools formed a consortium called CWP Inc. and got what one WVU administrator calls "a significant amount" of funding from the National Energy Technology Laboratory for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy. NETL has facilities in five states, including Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And those states, home to the schools in the consortium, hold millions of tons of coal.

"The focus here is on the fossil energy reserve - using coal to generate alternative uses of energy: coal to liquid, coal to gas, coal to chemical," said Curt Peterson, interim vice president for research and economic development at WVU. "All those technologies can evolve from the research we're doing here, thus, we hope, reducing our dependence on foreign energy supplies."

Scientists, faculty members and students at all three schools will try to harness more of the energy that is released when coal is burned and capture the by. products, preventing them from being released into the atmosphere and contributing to global warming, Peterson said.

"We need to develop improved turbine generators and new fuel cell technologies that use coal-derived synthetic fuels, along with new ways to capture and store greenhouse gases instead of releasing them into the atmosphere," said Carnegie Mellon chemical engineering Professor Andrew Gellman, who has been appointed research director for the consortium.

That last initiative is called carbon management, and its something WVU already was studying.

"When coal is burned in traditional generating facilities today, a lot of carbon is lost as carbon dioxide that escapes into the atmosphere and contributes to greenhouse gases," Peterson said.

Scientists are working on ways to convert that CO2 into a useful product or sequester it, tying it up in some way and storing it, perhaps underground, he said.

Carbon management is one example of research that already is occurring at WVU that will be expanded as a result of the grant, Peterson said.

WVU will get about one-third of the $26 million, he said.

"It's a substantial amount of money over a two-year period," he said. "Since the early '90s, we've done about $180 million in contracts and grants in the area of energy research."

The grant could be the beginning of a windfall of research dollars, he added. "With the formation of this consortium, we believe it will provide substantial opportunities for funding from the national laboratory," Peterson said.

The two-year period of fact-finding is just the start of changing energy production's effects on the environment.

"The eventual outcome of this is in two years we will have significantly expanded our collaboration with scientists and technical people at NETL," Peterson said. "Basic research will have been con-ducted and completed. Some might lead to research development activities. Intellectual property will be discovered."

But it will take many more years to take the technology from the research and put it to work in the world, he said.

All the projects fall under one eight categories identified for focused research: materials for energy technologies, process and dynamic systems modeling, eatalyst and reactor development, carbon management, sensor systems and diagnostics, energy conversion devices, gas hydrates and ultradeep and unconventional oil and gas production technology.

"We have eight different faculty members who have been identified as institutional fellows who will be overseeing research projects in each of those areas," Peterson said.

Copyright State Journal Corporation Apr 4, 2008

(c) 2008 State Journal, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.

Source: State Journal, The

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