Industry Partners
Steve Benson, Ph.D., President, Microbeam
www.microbeam.com
P: 701.213.7070
sbenson@microbeam.com
Dr. Steve Benson has over 25 years of research and development experience related to the development of efficient and clean energy production systems. His principal areas of interest and expertise include development and management of complex multidisciplinary programs including technologies to improve the performance of fuel resource recovery, refining, conversion and environmental control systems; transformations and fate of fuel impurities in combustion and gasification systems; carbon dioxide separation and capture technologies; advanced analytical techniques to measure the chemical and physical transformations of inorganic species in gases; computer-based models to predict the emissions and fate of pollutants from combustion and gasification systems; and advanced materials for power systems. Dr. Benson has over 200 publications.
Scott Johnson, President, SysDynX
Scott T. Johnson is a Principal Advisor with the IES, where his work involves project management, the application of system dynamics to dynamically complex problems, and teaching in the Petroleum Engineering Department. He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from South Dakota School of Mines & Technology (SDSM&T), has extensive industry education and work experience in petroleum engineering, and also completed course work (ABT) for a Master of Philosophy in System Dynamics from the University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway. Prior to his current position, Mr. Johnson served in BP’s Exploration & Technology Group (EPTG) as a System Dynamics and major project consultant. In total, his oil and gas and business consulting career spanned 28 years. Mr. Johnson's principal areas of interest and expertise include use of system dynamics technology and methods to help organizations address dynamically complex problems in the private and public sectors. He has extensive experience with Vensim System Dynamics software for consulting, teaching, and executive education.
Dr. Yong Hou, Co-Founder, Clean Republic
Clean Republic LLC is a ND-based start-up company with high motivation to market clean energy relevant products including electrical bikes, lithium ion batteries packs, solar water heating panels and related products. Currently a major problem with its trademark lithium battery pack “Dakota Lithium” brand is the poor “batch-to-batch” consistency of electrochemical performance, which is caused by the poor quality of the commercial cathode material lithium iron phosphate (LFP). Starting from May 2015 Clean Republic sponsored the University of North Dakota Institute for Energy Studies (IES) to launch a collaborative research effort to develop its own LFP cathode material. Based on positive preliminary results of the research, the IES in conjunction with Clean Republic is proposing a Phase I/II combined project to develop a low cost, environmentally benign, reproducible and up-scalable synthesis procedure for LFP cathode material.