News

Mines researchers aim to improve understanding of water’s role in climate change 3/17/2023

Mines researchers aim to improve understanding of water’s role in climate change

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Adrienne Marshall is featured in this article about how as emissions change snowpack melt, hydropower generation could fail in the near future. Marshall’s research, which is supported by a National Science Foundation IGERT grant and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, focuses on understanding how climate change impacts snow hydrology, such as how snow drifts change and how precipitation intensity mitigates or exacerbates the effects of warming on winter snowmelt. March 17, 2023.

America’s Military Depends on Minerals That China Controls 3/16/2023

America’s Military Depends on Minerals That China Controls

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian, Emily H. Holland, and Fellow Joshua Busby write about how rethinking supply chains is vital for U.S. security. The crucial role of supply chains and logistics in military operations. Simply stated, supply chains win wars and save lives. Materials need to be in the right place at the right time. March 16, 2023.

The Global Competition for Critical Minerals with Morgan Bazilian 3/16/2023

The Global Competition for Critical Minerals with Morgan Bazilian

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian is featured on the Energy Security Cubed podcast discussing the shift to clean energy, and how America must rethink supply chains amid the growing global competition over critical minerals. March 16, 2023.

How to get the minerals we need in a clean energy future 3/15/2023

How to get the minerals we need in a clean energy future

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian contributed to this article about how securing the critical minerals we need for a green energy future will require cleaning up mining practices, boosting recycling and innovating to be less dependent on them altogether. Technological innovation can help improve the environmental footprint of these processes. March 15, 2023.

Filling the hole Silicon Valley Bank left in the climate tech ecosystem 3/15/2023

Filling the hole Silicon Valley Bank left in the climate tech ecosystem

Payne Institute Sustainable Finance Lab Program Manager Brad Handler and Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian write about the Silicon Valley Bank playing a critical role in the climate tech industry, particularly for early-stage companies. The bank’s recent collapse will be felt even though its depositors will get their money back, as announced by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Still, one can expect some project investments to be delayed and the financial costs to startups to rise as a new risk appetite emerges. An important silver lining should be that more banks may eventually get more comfortable with supporting climate tech, which can help grow this funding “ecosystem” considerably and eventually lead to more investment. March 15, 2023

EPA announces plans to regulate toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” for the first time, dozens of Colorado water systems affected 3/15/2023

EPA announces plans to regulate toxic PFAS “forever chemicals” for the first time, dozens of Colorado water systems affected

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Chris Higgins was interviewed for this article and says that the EPA’s plan to regulate toxic PFAS is an important first step. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is proposing national legal limits on per- and polyflouroalkyl substances — or PFAS — in public water supplies. The proposed changes could affect dozens of public water utilities across the Centennial State. March 15, 2023

The Regulation of CO2 Pipelines and Ensuring Public Safety 3/15/2023

The Regulation of CO2 Pipelines and Ensuring Public Safety

Payne Institute CCUS Program Manager Anna Littlefield and student researcher Dwi Nuraini Siregar write that the 45Q tax credit is anticipated to play an important role in accelerating the expansion of the CO2 pipeline network in the United States by providing a financial incentive for businesses to invest in carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) technologies and supporting infrastructure.The Inflation Reduction Act’s amplification of this credit has already increased the number of CCUS projects. This activity, in addition to continuing demand for CO2 for oil and gas operations, will require an expansion of the US CO2 pipeline network. March 15, 2023

EPA’s proposed change on PFAS limits would deem dozens of Colorado water sources unsafe 3/14/2023

EPA’s proposed change on PFAS limits would deem dozens of Colorado water sources unsafe

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Chris Higgins contributes to this article on how water sources across Colorado contain potentially hazardous levels of the toxins under the new standard. Dozens of water sources across Colorado previously thought to be safe would now violate the federal maximum contaminant level for PFAS, or toxic “forever chemicals,” under a new standard proposed Tuesday. March 14 2023

Colorado’s healthy snowpack promises to offer some relief for strained water supplies 3/14/2023

Colorado’s healthy snowpack promises to offer some relief for strained water supplies

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Adrienne Marshall contributes to this article that talks about how the Western Slope snowpack has piled up to its normal peak weeks ahead of usual, and with more snow in the forecast, the healthy supply promises some relief to receding Colorado reservoirs. She says that from above, satellites are also tracking the total snow-covered area in Colorado. March 14, 2023.

Christopher Higgins recognized for PFAS research 3/14/2023

Christopher Higgins recognized for PFAS research

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Chris Higgins was honored for his research on poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, also known as PFAS, by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). ASCE awarded Higgins the 2022 Samuel Arnold Greeley Award for a paper he co-wrote with colleagues that include Mines PhD candidate Stefanie Shea. Higgins and Shea’s winning paper detailed research on the use of bench-scale experiments to measure and evaluate the desorption rate kinetics from a vadose zone soil exposed decades ago to aqueous film-forming foams (AFFFs). Also co-authoring the paper were Charles Schaefer and Dung Nguyen of CDM Smith; and Emerson Christie and Jennifer Field of Oregon State University. March 14, 2023.

Colorado School of Mines part of multi-university team selected by DoD for social science research 3/13/2023

Colorado School of Mines part of multi-university team selected by DoD for social science research

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian and Faculty Fellow Mark Deinert will be contributing to research on critical minerals, battery technology, and reducing dependence on hostile suppliers in the clean energy supply chain along with Payne Institute Fellow Professor Joshua Busby, LBJ School of Public Affairs and the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, University of Texas, Austin and Professor Emily Holland, U.S. Naval War College. March 13, 2023.

The life and death of a subglacial lake in West Antarctica 3/9/2023

The life and death of a subglacial lake in West Antarctica

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Matthew Siegfried and others write this paper that looks at the last 50 years, and the discovery and initial investigation of subglacial lakes in Antarctica have highlighted the paleoglaciological information that may be recorded in sediments at their beds. In December 2018, we accessed Mercer Subglacial Lake, West Antarctica, and recovered the first in situ subglacial lake-sediment record—120 mm of finely laminated mud. We combined geophysical observations, image analysis, and quantitative stratigraphy techniques to estimate long-term mean lake sedimentation. March 9, 2023

First-ever layered lake-sediment sample extracted from subglacial Antarctica 3/9/2023

First-ever layered lake-sediment sample extracted from subglacial Antarctica

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Matthew Siegfried is part of a NSF-funded project Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access (SALSA), that have extracted a layered lake-sediment sample that gives important details into past dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet and its cold, dark ecosystems. Their findings from analysis of the sediment sample, give important insight into the larger dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet and its history, including when the ice sheet was smaller than its current size. March 9, 2023

Securing Mineral Supply: Backwards Vertical Integration for Technology Companies

Master of Public Policy, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago student researcher Christian Gaona writes about how the demand for minerals has increased with the growing production of standard technologies, such as EV car batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels. However, major mining companies need help to satisfy the demand at the current rate, leading to inconsistent and expensive supply chains and environmental and geopolitical concerns. Technology companies should consider backward vertical integration strategies to mitigate against risks associated with supply chain issues, which would merge upstream processes essential to companies’ value chains.This article explores how tech companies are best suited to provide the capital and skill sets to overcome the risks associated with mineral extraction and ensure a cleaner, sustainable energy future. March 9, 2023.

The massive quest for the minerals we need in a clean energy future 3/8/2023

The massive quest for the minerals we need in a clean energy future

Payne Institute Director Morgan Bazilian contributes to this article about how the rush toward a clean energy future means digging, extracting and processing the Earth’s resources faster and better than ever before. He says that there is no fundamental medium or even long-term constraint on the resources themselves, but says there is a constraint on investment into mining and then the associated permitting and social license to operate. March 8, 2023.

Addressing the Need for Accurate and Comparable Greenhouse Gas Data: The COMET Framework

Former Payne Institute Program Manager Jordy Lee Calderon writes about how the Coalition on Materials Emissions Transparency (COMET) began as a collaboration between the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), the Colorado School of Mines (CSM), RMI (formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute), and the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN Climate Change). Its objective is to advance accurate and transparent greenhouse gas accounting through a harmonized set of principles, standards, and reporting requirements. March 2, 2023.

Aurora, other communities await first US limits on ‘forever chemicals’ spills at military sites 3/2/2023

Aurora, other communities await first US limits on ‘forever chemicals’ spills at military sites

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Chris Higgins contributes to this article and states that “It is very clear there is PFOS and PFOA (on Buckley) and they are at orders of magnitude above the health advisory — which is really not a surprise, being that that is very typical for a foam-fire-fighting site.” He went on to add that this is a national-scale issue that is being addressed everywhere in the country. March 2, 2023.

Carbon capture utilization and storage in review: Sociotechnical implications for a carbon reliant world 3/2/2023

Payne Institute Fellow Steve Griffiths, Director Morgan Bazilian, CCUS Program Manager Anna Littlefield, student researchers Hope McLaughlin, Maia Menefee, Austin Kinzer, Tobias Hull, along with Benjamin K.Sovacool, and Jinsoo Kim write about how the decarbonization of industry and industrial systems is a pressing challenge given the relative lack of low-carbon options available for “hard to decarbonize” sectors such as steelmaking, cement manufacturing, and chemical production. Carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS) represents a promising and crosscutting solution to this formidable problem. This review takes a systematic and sociotechnical perspective to examine how CCUS can support industrial decarbonization and relevant associated technical, economic, and social factors. March 2, 2023.

Market failures and willingness to accept smart meters: Experimental evidence from the UK 3/1/2023

Market failures and willingness to accept smart meters: Experimental evidence from the UK

Payne Institute Fellow Greer Gosnell and Daire McCoy write about how the sustainable energy transition, governments and innovators are encouraging households to adopt smart technologies that allow for increased flexibility in energy grids. This research contributes experimental evidence regarding the import of oft-cited market failures by studying the case of a relatively new technology – the smart electricity meter – in the context of an unprecedented UK-wide government-led public participation campaign. March 1, 2023.

Energy efficient living: Mines professor leads project to refurbish neighborhood 2/28/2023

Energy efficient living: Mines professor leads project to refurbish neighborhood

Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Paulo Tabares-Velasco leads a collaborative project to cut carbon emissions, increase energy efficiency in a Colorado manufactured home community. Many new-construction houses are designed with energy efficient and carbon emission-reducing features, like solar panels and highly insulated windows. A project led Tabares-Velasco aims to extend those energy benefits to a whole community of manufactured homes in Colorado. February 28, 2023.

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