Projects
Current Projects
- Rare Earth Elements in U.S. Coal-Based Resources: Sampling, Characterization, and Round-Robin Interlaboratory Study
- Spouted Fluid Beds for Chemical Looping Combustion
- Economic Extraction and Recovery of REEs and Production of Clean Value-Added Products from Low-Rank Coal Fly Ash
- Improvement of Alstom’s Limestone Chemical Looping Combustion Process for Higher Purity Flue Gas Production
- Improving Coal Fired Plant Performance through Integrated Predictive and Condition-Based Monitoring Tools
- Phase 2: Investigation of Rare Earth Element Extraction from North Dakota Coal-Related Feedstocks
- Low-Cost and Recyclable Oxygen Carrier and Novel Process for Chemical Looping Combustion
- Method for Separation of Coal Conversion Products from Sorbents/Oxygen Carriers
- Methodology for Attrition Evaluation of Oxygen Carriers in Chemical Looping Systems
- A Low Cost and Reproducible Synthetic Procedure for Mass Production of Lithium Iron Phosphate Cathode Materials for Lithium Ion Batteries
- Evaluation of a Novel Crude Oil Conditioning Technology
Institute for Energy Studies / Priority Initiatives
Use of fossil fuels in a carbon constrained environment / carbon management:
- Capture of CO2 using sorbent materials
- Novel combustion technologies with a focus on chemical looping combustion
- Co-production of products with energy production / activated carbon-steam-electricity
- Modular-scale gasification (5 to 20 MW)
- Efficiency improvement / Impacts of cyclic operation
- New products from coal
Recovery of valuable/rare minerals and elements:
- Recovery of rare earth elements from coal and coal by-products
- Recovery of lithium, nickel and other valuable materials from oil field process waters
- Recovery of rare earth elements and other valuable materials from recycled electronic wastes
- Rare earth value chain including recovering other critical materials
- Co-producing graphene and rare earth elements from Leonardite and lignite
- Recycle lithium, nickel and others materials from waste batteries and other electronic wastes
Building a renewable energy portfolio – moving beyond fossil fuel:
- Lithium iron phosphate batteries (cathode material development, battery management systems)
- Developing and integrating energy storage devices into the grid – chemical (battery); thermochemical (CLC), and others
- Energy policy using system dynamic analysis
- Geothermal energy development
- Wireless power generation
Support for Industry:
- Advanced analytical characterization lab
- Bench-scale systems for quick and low-cost analysis of combustion and gasification technologies
- Build and test bench- and pilot-scale systems for new processes
- Technological and economic feasibility analysis of new or modified processes
- SBIR/STTR support
Other general areas of development / interest
- Process water treatment
- Development of wireless sensors for hostile environments (high temperature and/or corrosive)
- Systems dynamics applications
- Energy/water/food nexus
- Synthesis of advanced materials (new rare earth alloys, materials for hostile environments, etc)
- Oil & gas related research
- Distributed energy
- Environmental issues