MINES CLIMBS TOGETHER: COVID-19 health and safety resources, updates

Category: US and Canada

THE MOSAIC APPROACH: a Multidimensional Strategy for Strengthening America’s Critical Minerals Supply Chain 10/18/2021

The Mosaic Approach: a Multidimensional Strategy for Strengthening America’s Critical Minerals Supply Chain

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian and Faculty Fellow Ian Lange contribute to this report by the Wilson Center on how the United States faces a troubling scenario when it comes to the supply chain for critical minerals. Rapidly increasing demand, under-developed national resources, intense international competition, and years of neglect in this issue area place the U.S. at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis China in securing access to the metals and Rare Earth Elements that are vital for the energy transition and for geopolitical ambitions. This paper reflects the dialogue sustained by a high-level group of stakeholders in the summer of 2021 and argues that the United States must take a number of key steps to make the critical minerals supply chain more resilient.  October 18, 2021.

Application of Mobile Energy Storage for Enhancing Power Grid Resilience: A Review 10/10/2021

Application of Mobile Energy Storage for Enhancing Power Grid Resilience: A Review

Mines/NREL Advanced Energy Systems PhD student Jesse Dugan, Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Salman Mohagheghi, and NREL Researcher Benjamin Kroposki write about how natural disasters can lead to large-scale power outages, affecting critical infrastructure and causing social and economic damages. These events are exacerbated by climate change, which increases their frequency and magnitude. Improving power grid resilience can help mitigate the damages caused by these events. Mobile energy storage systems, classified as truck-mounted or towable battery storage systems, have recently been considered to enhance distribution grid resilience by providing localized support to critical loads during an outage. This paper provides a comprehensive and critical review of academic literature on mobile energy storage for power system resilience enhancement.  October 10, 2021.

Mines professor part of team using supercomputing, big data to answer seismology’s biggest questions 10/7/2021

Mines professor part of team using supercomputing, big data to answer seismology’s biggest questions

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Ebru Bozdag is one of the five principal investigators of a $3.2 million NSF research project over four years that will unite seismic data analysis and modeling with supercomputing power to answer some of the biggest questions about Earth’s seismic activity, interior, and dynamics. October 7, 2021.

CCUS gains momentum despite midstream challenges 10/6/2021

CCUS gains momentum despite midstream challenges

Payne Institute Communications Associate Brooke Bowser, Program Manager Laura Singer, and Director Morgan Bazilian write about how carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) technology has again become popular in discussions on how to combat climate change, but the associated midstream infrastructure necessary to support an energy transition remains underdeveloped and often overlooked.  October 6, 2021.

Why Biden’s Methane Fee Isn’t a Gas Tax 10/5/2021

Why Biden’s Methane Fee Isn’t a Gas Tax

Payne Institute Fellow Liam Denning writes an opinion piece on how President Biden’s methane fee isn’t a gas tax, but it’s a tax on the natural-gas industry for failing to capture and sell its own product. This isn’t a tax on the gas we consume but rather the gas that somehow never makes it far enough for us to consume.  October 5, 2021.

Colorado’s Skies Really Are That Much Smokier As Western Wildfires Worsen 9/28/2021

Colorado’s Skies Really Are That Much Smokier As Western Wildfires Worsen

Payne Institute Earth Observation Group Research Associate Tamara Sparks contributes to this article about how a surge of large wildfires in the West, fueled in part by climate change, has increased the number of days residents are breathing smoke across nearly every part of Colorado.  The number of days with smoky skies has grown over the last decade, the data show, blanketing Colorado from the Eastern Plains to the Western Slope — including northern parts of the state and the heavily populated Front Range corridor.  September 28, 2021.

Tallgrass to track, measure emissions on U.S. interstate natgas pipeline 9/28/2021

Tallgrass to track, measure emissions on U.S. interstate natural gas pipeline

The Payne Institute is a data science partner with Project Canary to help Tallgrass Energy Partners monitor emissions, including methane and other greenhouse gases, on its Rockies Express Pipeline, making it the first U.S. company to measure the environmental impact of operations on an interstate natural gas pipeline.  September 28, 2021.  

To lead the green energy future, solar must clean up its supply chains 9/28/2021

To lead the green energy future, solar must clean up its supply chains

Payne Institute Fellow Dustin Mulvaney and Director Morgan Bazilian write about how the solar industry must work with governments to clean up the solar supply chain.  The rapid growth of the solar energy industry has seen in recent years is expected to continue.  Solar is now one of the cheapest power sources available globally, but its long-term sustainability has been threatened by allegations of forced labour and coal use by some silicon producers that supply the solar panel industry.  September 28, 2021.

Harnessing data for materials discovery goal of new $15M NSF Institute for Data-Driven Dynamical Design 9/28/2021

Harnessing data for materials discovery goal of new $15M NSF Institute for Data-Driven Dynamical Design

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Eric Toberer is leading the Harnessing Data Revolution Institutes funded nationwide.  A new $15 million interdisciplinary research institute led by Colorado School of Mines aims to create new theoretically grounded and experimentally validated approaches and tools to design and discover dynamical materials and structures while solving long-standing scientific challenges in the dynamical response of materials.  September 28, 2021.

Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right: A Global and Country Update of Fossil Fuel Subsidies 9/24/2021

Still Not Getting Energy Prices Right: A Global and Country Update of Fossil Fuel Subsidies

Payne Institute Fellow Ian Parry, Simon Black, and Nate Vernon write about a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect their full private and social costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by mispricing fuels. The methodology improves over previous IMF analyses through more sophisticated estimation of costs and impacts of reform.  September 24, 2021.