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      in Environment

      Four researchers with MIT ties earn Schmidt Science Fellowships

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      Four researchers with MIT ties — Juncal Arbelaiz, Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao, Sandya Subramanian, and Heather Zlotnick ’17 — have been honored with competitive Schmidt Science Fellowships.

      Created in 2017, the fellows program aims to bring together the world’s brightest minds “to solve society’s toughest challenges.”

      The four MIT-affiliated researchers are among 29 Schmidt Science Fellows from around the world who will receive postdoctoral support for either one or two years with an annual stipend of $100,000, along with individualized mentoring and participation in the program’s Global Meeting Series. The fellows will also have opportunities to engage with thought-leaders from science, business, policy, and society. According to the award announcement, the fellows are expected to pursue research that shifts from the focus of their PhDs, to help expand and enhance their futures as scientific leaders.

      Juncal Arbelaiz is a PhD candidate in applied mathematics at MIT, who is completing her doctorate this summer. Her doctoral research at MIT is advised by Ali Jadbabaie, the JR East Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Anette Hosoi, the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of the School of Engineering; and Bassam Bamieh, professor of mechanical engineering and associate director of the Center for Control, Dynamical Systems, and Computation at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Arbelaiz’s research revolves around the design of optimal decentralized intelligence for spatially-distributed dynamical systems.

      “I cannot think of a better way to start my independent scientific career. I feel very excited and grateful for this opportunity,” says Arbelaiz. With her fellowship, she will enlist systems biology to explore how the nervous system encodes and processes sensory information to address future safety-critical artificial intelligence applications. “The Schmidt Science Fellowship will provide me with a unique opportunity to work at the intersection of biological and machine intelligence for two years and will be a steppingstone towards my longer-term objective of becoming a researcher in bio-inspired machine intelligence,” she says.

      Xiangkun (Elvis) Cao is currently a postdoc in the lab of T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor in Chemical Engineering, and an Impact Fellow at the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. Cao received his PhD in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 2021, during which he focused on microscopic precision in the simultaneous delivery of light and fluids by optofluidics, with advances relevant to health and sustainability applications. As a Schmidt Science Fellow, he plans to be co-advised by Hatton on carbon capture, and Ted Sargent, professor of chemistry at Northwestern University, on carbon utilization. Cao is passionate about integrated carbon capture and utilization (CCU) from molecular to process levels, machine learning to inspire smart CCU, and the nexus of technology, business, and policy for CCU.

      “The Schmidt Science Fellowship provides the perfect opportunity for me to work across disciplines to study integrated carbon capture and utilization from molecular to process levels,” Cao explains. “My vision is that by integrating carbon capture and utilization, we can concurrently make scientific discoveries and unlock economic opportunities while mitigating global climate change. This way, we can turn our carbon liability into an asset.”

      Sandya Subramanian, a 2021 PhD graduate of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) in the area of medical engineering and medical physics, is currently a postdoc at Stanford Data Science. She is focused on the topics of biomedical engineering, statistics, machine learning, neuroscience, and health care. Her research is on developing new technologies and methods to study the interactions between the brain, the autonomic nervous system, and the gut. “I’m extremely honored to receive the Schmidt Science Fellowship and to join the Schmidt community of leaders and scholars,” says Subramanian. “I’ve heard so much about the fellowship and the fact that it can open doors and give people confidence to pursue challenging or unique paths.”

      According to Subramanian, the autonomic nervous system and its interactions with other body systems are poorly understood but thought to be involved in several disorders, such as functional gastrointestinal disorders, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, migraines, and eating disorders. The goal of her research is to improve our ability to monitor and quantify these physiologic processes. “I’m really interested in understanding how we can use physiological monitoring technologies to inform clinical decision-making, especially around the autonomic nervous system, and I look forward to continuing the work that I’ve recently started at Stanford as Schmidt Science Fellow,” she says. “A huge thank you to all of the mentors, colleagues, friends, and leaders I had the pleasure of meeting and working with at HST and MIT; I couldn’t have done this without everything I learned there.”

      Hannah Zlotnick ’17 attended MIT for her undergraduate studies, majoring in biological engineering with a minor in mechanical engineering. At MIT, Zlotnick was a student-athlete on the women’s varsity soccer team, a UROP student in Alan Grodzinsky’s laboratory, and a member of Pi Beta Phi. For her PhD, Zlotnick attended the University of Pennsylvania, and worked in Robert Mauck’s laboratory within the departments of Bioengineering and Orthopaedic Surgery.

      Zlotnick’s PhD research focused on harnessing remote forces, such as magnetism or gravity, to enhance engineered cartilage and osteochondral repair both in vitro and in large animal models. Zlotnick now plans to pivot to the field of biofabrication to create tissue models of the knee joint to assess potential therapeutics for osteoarthritis. “I am humbled to be a part of the Schmidt Science Fellows community, and excited to venture into the field of biofabrication,” Zlotnick says. “Hopefully this work uncovers new therapies for patients with inflammatory joint diseases.” More

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      in Environment

      Charting the landscape at MIT

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      Norman Magnuson’s MIT career — culminating in his role as manager of grounds services in the Department of Facilities for the past 20 years — started in 1974 with a summer job. Fresh out of high school and unsure of his next step, Magnuson’s father, Norman Sr., a housing manager at MIT, encouraged him to take a summer staffer position with MIT Grounds Services. That temporary job would turn into a 48-year career, in which Magnuson found and fed his passion for horticulture.

      Over the years, Magnuson has had a number of roles, including mover, truck driver, and landscaper. In his most recent role, Magnuson was responsible for managing and maintaining the grounds of MIT’s more-than-168-acre campus — work that includes landscaping, snow removal, and event setup — a position where his pride of work could be seen across campus. Now, after nearly half a century at the Institute, Magnuson is retiring, leaving an enormous set of shoes to fill.

      “Norman’s passion for stewarding an immense array of green spaces has delighted the eyes of tens of thousands of people from around the world who have worked, visited, studied, and resided at MIT over the years,” says Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins. Adds Martin O’Brien, senior manager of Campus Services, “Not only do he and his team excel at high-profile events like snowstorms and Commencement, but day to day, they keep the campus shining.”

      Touching six decades on a transforming campus

      Like many who have spent dozens of years at the Institute, when asked what has changed the most in his time here, Magnuson thinks first of MIT’s skyline. He notes that the Landau Building (Building 66) was the first new construction he saw on campus. He remembers seeing E40 and E51 be transformed from warehouses to more functional spaces for research and labs — a pattern that would be repeated often during his time at MIT. As each part of campus dramatically evolved, so did the quiet and steadfast work of Magnuson and Grounds Services.

      When Magnuson first started working for Grounds Services, he says that landscaping was often an afterthought. “We worked with whatever extra budget money there was,” he remembers, speaking of the landscaping support for new buildings. Magnuson says that over his long career, the work of his department became more professionalized and integrated with departments like the Office of Campus Planning. Grounds Services now works closely with that office to support design and management of resilient campus landscapes that incorporate systems of soils, plantings, and hardscapes for stormwater management, as well as mitigating heat island effects while growing and diversifying the urban forest canopy.

      “There’s growing recognition of the contributions that our campus green spaces make to both community well-being and campus resiliency,” explains Laura Tenny, senior campus planner. “Over the last two years, people have rediscovered the outdoors as a place to come together, and so these campus spaces have become part of the social fabric of MIT. As landscapes become more performance-based and more like living green infrastructure, Norman has overseen a complex campus system that’s working at multiple levels, not unlike our sophisticated building and infrastructure systems.”

      Magnuson says he always welcomed change in the landscaping space and has worked hard to drive it. “I like to be on the cutting edge,” he says highlighting environmentally- and climate-friendly change he’s pushed for. “I can remember when we used to do things like throw leaves in the trash in plastic garbage bags,” he says. “These days, we’ve almost eliminated herbicides and pesticides, we’re mindful of the fertilizer that we use, and we’re very cognizant of things like this because we work with teams like the Office of Sustainability (MITOS).”

      As Magnuson and his team have striven to do better for the environment, he notes that he has also seen firsthand how climate change is transforming the campus landscape: “Leaves fall off the deciduous trees earlier than they used to. This year the azaleas bloomed late; the rhododendrons were a little bit early. When you look at particular plants that have been in the ground for many years, you do see the difference,” he says, adding that snow seasons have also become more unpredictable despite improved forecasting technology.

      Enduring connections with the community

      With his craft and campus always changing, one thing remained constant for Magnuson: MIT students. Magnuson and his team have connected with students for countless interviews and research projects over the years — a highlight of his work and a reminder of its impact. “I always tell my staff that we help educate the students — not directly most times, but we are part of the mechanism that makes it possible for them to be here,” he says.

      A recent project for Magnuson was working with students to create and maintain The Hive Garden, MIT’s first sustainability garden and a collaborative project between MITOS, the Undergraduate Association Committee on Sustainability, and Grounds Services. “That was probably one of my favorite interactions with the students,” Magnuson says of the garden. Susy Jones, senior sustainability project manager who worked with Magnuson on the garden, says Magnuson played an essential role: “He took real joy in working with the students — they brought him sketches of these complex hexagonal garden beds, and I watched him and his team sit patiently with them and come up with something we could implement quickly that would maintain the integrity of their designs,” she remembers. “His team happily taught the students how to irrigate the beds and which plants to cut back in the winter — little lessons about the natural world they’ll take with them forever.” 

      As Magnuson begins his retirement, he capped off his career with one more go at this favorite MIT event — Commencement. Though the event requires tremendous amounts of work for Grounds Services, Magnuson looks forward to it each year. “It’s our Super Bowl,” he says. Each spring the Grounds Services team partners with the MIT Repair and Maintenance Carpentry crew to ready Killian Court for several thousand people by turning the open court into a massive seating area and stage while protecting and highlighting the grounds. “When the students come in and they announce them, it’s always an emotional moment for me, because it’s, ‘OK, this is it, it started, and everything looks perfect,’” he says. Former executive officer for Commencement Gayle Gallagher, who worked closely with Magnuson for more than two dozen Commencement weekends, agrees with the “perfect” assessment. “His commitment to the campus grounds — regardless of the season — was unparalleled. He spent countless hours each year to ensure our campus looked its absolute best for our graduates, their families and guests, and our alumni,” she recalls. “I always looked forward to collaborating with him — he is simply one-of-a-kind.”

      When Magnuson looks back on his long career, he notes that community and camaraderie are a large part of what kept him with MIT for so long. He’s built many relationships at MIT (his wife, Diane, recently retired from MIT Medical after 44 years, and his daughter Kelsey works with the Department of Facilities Contracts team) and says his department has the unique ability to support individuals and foster careers like it did for him. “We have some very, very talented people and we have a lot of people like me who learned on the job. Landscaping is one of those professions that if you put your all into it, you can get a degree in landscaping without having an actual degree,” he says.

      “Everybody that works for Grounds is so proud of what they do — you can see it in the work,” he adds. “I’m so proud of the work I’ve done.” More

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      in Energy

      Getting the carbon out of India’s heavy industries

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      The world’s third largest carbon emitter after China and the United States, India ranks seventh in a major climate risk index. Unless India, along with the nearly 200 other signatory nations of the Paris Agreement, takes aggressive action to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels, physical and financial losses from floods, droughts, and cyclones could become more severe than they are today. So, too, could health impacts associated with the hazardous air pollution levels now affecting more than 90 percent of its population.  

      To address both climate and air pollution risks and meet its population’s escalating demand for energy, India will need to dramatically decarbonize its energy system in the coming decades. To that end, its initial Paris Agreement climate policy pledge calls for a reduction in carbon dioxide intensity of GDP by 33-35 percent by 2030 from 2005 levels, and an increase in non-fossil-fuel-based power to about 40 percent of cumulative installed capacity in 2030. At the COP26 international climate change conference, India announced more aggressive targets, including the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2070.

      Meeting its climate targets will require emissions reductions in every economic sector, including those where emissions are particularly difficult to abate. In such sectors, which involve energy-intensive industrial processes (production of iron and steel; nonferrous metals such as copper, aluminum, and zinc; cement; and chemicals), decarbonization options are limited and more expensive than in other sectors. Whereas replacing coal and natural gas with solar and wind could lower carbon dioxide emissions in electric power generation and transportation, no easy substitutes can be deployed in many heavy industrial processes that release CO2 into the air as a byproduct.

      However, other methods could be used to lower the emissions associated with these processes, which draw upon roughly 50 percent of India’s natural gas, 25 percent of its coal, and 20 percent of its oil. Evaluating the potential effectiveness of such methods in the next 30 years, a new study in the journal Energy Economics led by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is the first to explicitly explore emissions-reduction pathways for India’s hard-to-abate sectors.

      Using an enhanced version of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, the study assesses existing emissions levels in these sectors and projects how much they can be reduced by 2030 and 2050 under different policy scenarios. Aimed at decarbonizing industrial processes, the scenarios include the use of subsidies to increase electricity use, incentives to replace coal with natural gas, measures to improve industrial resource efficiency, policies to put a price on carbon, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, and hydrogen in steel production.

      The researchers find that India’s 2030 Paris Agreement pledge may still drive up fossil fuel use and associated greenhouse gas emissions, with projected carbon dioxide emissions from hard-to-abate sectors rising by about 2.6 times from 2020 to 2050. But scenarios that also promote electrification, natural gas support, and resource efficiency in hard-to-abate sectors can lower their CO2 emissions by 15-20 percent.

      While appearing to move the needle in the right direction, those reductions are ultimately canceled out by increased demand for the products that emerge from these sectors. So what’s the best path forward?

      The researchers conclude that only the incentive of carbon pricing or the advance of disruptive technology can move hard-to-abate sector emissions below their current levels. To achieve significant emissions reductions, they maintain, the price of carbon must be high enough to make CCS economically viable. In that case, reductions of 80 percent below current levels could be achieved by 2050.

      “Absent major support from the government, India will be unable to reduce carbon emissions in its hard-to-abate sectors in alignment with its climate targets,” says MIT Joint Program deputy director Sergey Paltsev, the study’s lead author. “A comprehensive government policy could provide robust incentives for the private sector in India and generate favorable conditions for foreign investments and technology advances. We encourage decision-makers to use our findings to design efficient pathways to reduce emissions in those sectors, and thereby help lower India’s climate and air pollution-related health risks.” More

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      in Environment

      Kerry Emanuel: A climate scientist and meteorologist in the eye of the storm

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      Kerry Emanuel once joked that whenever he retired, he would start a “hurricane safari” so other people could experience what it’s like to fly into the eye of a hurricane.

      “All of a sudden, the turbulence stops, the sun comes out, bright sunshine, and it’s amazingly calm. And you’re in this grand stadium [of clouds miles high],” he says. “It’s quite an experience.”

      While the hurricane safari is unlikely to come to fruition — “You can’t just conjure up a hurricane,” he explains — Emanuel, a world-leading expert on links between hurricanes and climate change, is retiring from teaching in the Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT after a more than 40-year career.

      Best known for his foundational contributions to the science of tropical cyclones, climate, and links between them, Emanuel has also been a prominent voice in public debates on climate change, and what we should do about it.

      “Kerry has had an enormous effect on the world through the students and junior scientists he has trained,” says William Boos PhD ’08, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. “He’s a brilliant enough scientist and theoretician that he didn’t need any of us to accomplish what he has, but he genuinely cares about educating new generations of scientists and helping to launch their careers.”

      In recognition of Emanuel’s teaching career and contributions to science, a symposium was held in his honor at MIT on June 21 and 22, organized by several of his former students and collaborators, including Boos. Research presented at the symposium focused on the many fields influenced by Emanuel’s more than 200 published research papers — on everything from forecasting the risks posed by tropical cyclones to understanding how rainfall is produced by continent-sized patterns of atmospheric circulation.

      Emanuel’s career observing perturbations of Earth’s atmosphere started earlier than he can remember. “According to my older brother, from the age of 2, I would crawl to the window whenever there was a thunderstorm,” he says. At first, those were the rolling thunderheads of the Midwest where he grew up, then it was the edges of hurricanes during a few teenage years in Florida. Eventually, he would find himself watching from the very eye of the storm, both physically and mathematically.

      Emanuel attended MIT both as an undergraduate studying Earth and planetary sciences, and for his PhD in meteorology, writing a dissertation on thunderstorms that form ahead of cold fronts. Within the department, he worked with some of the central figures of modern meteorology such as Jule Charney, Fred Sanders, and Edward Lorenz — the founder of chaos theory.

      After receiving his PhD in 1978, Emanuel joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. During this period, he also took a semester sabbatical to film the wind speeds of tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma. After three years, he returned to MIT and joined the Department of Meteorology in 1981. Two years later, the department merged with Earth and Planetary Sciences to form EAPS as it is known today, and where Emanuel has remained ever since.

      At MIT, he shifted scales. The thunderstorms and tornadoes that had been the focus of Emanuel’s research up to then were local atmospheric phenomena, or “mesoscale” in the language of meteorologists. The larger “synoptic scale” storms that are hurricanes blew into Emanuel’s research when as a young faculty member he was asked to teach a class in tropical meteorology; in prepping for the class, Emanuel found his notes on hurricanes from graduate school no longer made sense.

      “I realized I didn’t understand them because they couldn’t have been correct,” he says. “And so I set out to try to find a much better theoretical formulation for hurricanes.”

      He soon made two important contributions. In 1986, his paper “An Air-Sea Interaction Theory for Tropical Cyclones. Part 1: Steady-State Maintenance” developed a new theory for upper limits of hurricane intensity given atmospheric conditions. This work in turn led to even larger-scale questions to address. “That upper bound had to be dependent on climate, and it was likely to go up if we were to warm the climate,” Emanuel says — a phenomenon he explored in another paper, “The Dependence of Hurricane Intensity on Climate,” which showed how warming sea surface temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions from a warming climate would make hurricanes more destructive.

      “In my view, this is among the most remarkable achievements in theoretical geophysics,” says Adam Sobel PhD ’98, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University who got to know Emanuel after he graduated and became interested in tropical meteorology. “From first principles, using only pencil-and-paper analysis and physical reasoning, he derives a quantitative bound on hurricane intensity that has held up well over decades of comparison to observations” and underpins current methods of predicting hurricane intensity and how it changes with climate.

      This and diverse subsequent work led to numerous honors, including membership to the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

      Emanuel’s research was never confined to academic circles, however; when politicians and industry leaders voiced loud opposition to the idea that human-caused climate change posed a threat, he spoke up.

      “I felt kind of a duty to try to counter that,” says Emanuel. “I thought it was an interesting challenge to see if you could go out and convince what some people call climate deniers, skeptics, that this was a serious risk and we had to treat it as such.”

      In addition to many public lectures and media appearances discussing climate change, Emanuel penned a book for general audiences titled “What We Know About Climate Change,” in addition to a widely-read primer on climate change and risk assessment designed to influence business leaders.

      “Kerry has an unmatched physical understanding of tropical climate phenomena,” says Emanuel’s colleague, Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at EAPS. “But he’s also a great communicator and has generously given his time to public outreach. His book ‘What We Know About Climate Change’ is a beautiful piece of work that is readily understandable and has captivated many a non-expert reader.”

      Along with a number of other prominent climate scientists, Emanuel also began advocating for expanding nuclear power as the most rapid path to decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.

      “I think the impediment to nuclear is largely irrational in the United States,” he says. “So, I’ve been trying to fight that just like I’ve been trying to fight climate denial.”

      One lesson Emanuel has taken from his public work on climate change is that skeptical audiences often respond better to issues framed in positive terms than to doom and gloom; he’s found emphasizing the potential benefits rather than the sacrifices involved in the energy transition can engage otherwise wary audiences.

      “It’s really not opposition to science, per se,” he says. “It’s fear of the societal changes they think are required to do something about it.”

      He has also worked to raise awareness about how insurance companies significantly underestimate climate risks in their policies, in particular by basing hurricane risk on unreliable historical data. One recent practical result has been a project by the First Street Foundation to assess the true flood risk of every property in the United States using hurricane models Emanuel developed.

      “I think it’s transformative,” Emanuel says of the project with First Street. “That may prove to be the most substantive research I’ve done.”

      Though Emanuel is retiring from teaching, he has no plans to stop working. “When I say ‘retire’ it’s in quotes,” he says. In 2011, Emanuel and Professor of Geophysics Daniel Rothman founded the Lorenz Center, a climate research center at MIT in honor of Emanuel’s mentor and friend Edward Lorenz. Emanuel will continue to participate in work at the center, which aims to counter what Emanuel describes as a trend away from “curiosity-driven” work in climate science.

      “Even if there were no such thing as global warming, [climate science] would still be a really, really exciting field,” says Emanuel. “There’s so much to understand about climate, about the climates of the past, about the climates of other planets.”

      In addition to work with the Lorenz Center, he’s become interested once again in tornadoes and severe local storms, and understanding whether climate also controls such local phenomena. He’s also involved in two of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges projects focused on translating climate hazards to explicit financial and health risks — what will bring the dangers of climate change home to people, he says, is for the public to understand more concrete risks, like agricultural failure, water shortages, electricity shortages, and severe weather events. Capturing that will drive the next few years of his work.

      “I’m going to be stepping up research in some respects,” he says, now living full-time at his home in Maine.

      Of course, “retiring” does mean a bit more free time for new pursuits, like learning a language or an instrument, and “rediscovering the art of sailing,” says Emanuel. He’s looking forward to those days on the water, whatever storms are to come. More

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      in Energy

      Tapping into the million-year energy source below our feet

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      There’s an abandoned coal power plant in upstate New York that most people regard as a useless relic. But MIT’s Paul Woskov sees things differently.

      Woskov, a research engineer in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, notes the plant’s power turbine is still intact and the transmission lines still run to the grid. Using an approach he’s been working on for the last 14 years, he’s hoping it will be back online, completely carbon-free, within the decade.

      In fact, Quaise Energy, the company commercializing Woskov’s work, believes if it can retrofit one power plant, the same process will work on virtually every coal and gas power plant in the world.

      Quaise is hoping to accomplish those lofty goals by tapping into the energy source below our feet. The company plans to vaporize enough rock to create the world’s deepest holes and harvest geothermal energy at a scale that could satisfy human energy consumption for millions of years. They haven’t yet solved all the related engineering challenges, but Quaise’s founders have set an ambitious timeline to begin harvesting energy from a pilot well by 2026.

      The plan would be easier to dismiss as unrealistic if it were based on a new and unproven technology. But Quaise’s drilling systems center around a microwave-emitting device called a gyrotron that has been used in research and manufacturing for decades.

      “This will happen quickly once we solve the immediate engineering problems of transmitting a clean beam and having it operate at a high energy density without breakdown,” explains Woskov, who is not formally affiliated with Quaise but serves as an advisor. “It’ll go fast because the underlying technology, gyrotrons, are commercially available. You could place an order with a company and have a system delivered right now — granted, these beam sources have never been used 24/7, but they are engineered to be operational for long time periods. In five or six years, I think we’ll have a plant running if we solve these engineering problems. I’m very optimistic.”

      Woskov and many other researchers have been using gyrotrons to heat material in nuclear fusion experiments for decades. It wasn’t until 2008, however, after the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) published a request for proposals on new geothermal drilling technologies, that Woskov thought of using gyrotrons for a new application.

      “[Gyrotrons] haven’t been well-publicized in the general science community, but those of us in fusion research understood they were very powerful beam sources — like lasers, but in a different frequency range,” Woskov says. “I thought, why not direct these high-power beams, instead of into fusion plasma, down into rock and vaporize the hole?”

      As power from other renewable energy sources has exploded in recent decades, geothermal energy has plateaued, mainly because geothermal plants only exist in places where natural conditions allow for energy extraction at relatively shallow depths of up to 400 feet beneath the Earth’s surface. At a certain point, conventional drilling becomes impractical because deeper crust is both hotter and harder, which wears down mechanical drill bits.

      Woskov’s idea to use gyrotron beams to vaporize rock sent him on a research journey that has never really stopped. With some funding from MITEI, he began running tests, quickly filling his office with small rock formations he’d blasted with millimeter waves from a small gyrotron in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

      Woskov displaying samples in his lab in 2016.

      Photo: Paul Rivenberg

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      Around 2018, Woskov’s rocks got the attention of Carlos Araque ’01, SM ’02, who had spent his career in the oil and gas industry and was the technical director of MIT’s investment fund The Engine at the time.

      That year, Araque and Matt Houde, who’d been working with geothermal company AltaRock Energy, founded Quaise. Quaise was soon given a grant by the Department of Energy to scale up Woskov’s experiments using a larger gyrotron.

      With the larger machine, the team hopes to vaporize a hole 10 times the depth of Woskov’s lab experiments. That is expected to be accomplished by the end of this year. After that, the team will vaporize a hole 10 times the depth of the previous one — what Houde calls a 100-to-1 hole.

      “That’s something [the DOE] is particularly interested in, because they want to address the challenges posed by material removal over those greater lengths — in other words, can we show we’re fully flushing out the rock vapors?” Houde explains. “We believe the 100-to-1 test also gives us the confidence to go out and mobilize a prototype gyrotron drilling rig in the field for the first field demonstrations.”

      Tests on the 100-to-1 hole are expected to be completed sometime next year. Quaise is also hoping to begin vaporizing rock in field tests late next year. The short timeline reflects the progress Woskov has already made in his lab.

      Although more engineering research is needed, ultimately, the team expects to be able to drill and operate these geothermal wells safely. “We believe, because of Paul’s work at MIT over the past decade, that most if not all of the core physics questions have been answered and addressed,” Houde says. “It’s really engineering challenges we have to answer, which doesn’t mean they’re easy to solve, but we’re not working against the laws of physics, to which there is no answer. It’s more a matter of overcoming some of the more technical and cost considerations to making this work at a large scale.”

      The company plans to begin harvesting energy from pilot geothermal wells that reach rock temperatures at up to 500 C by 2026. From there, the team hopes to begin repurposing coal and natural gas plants using its system.

      “We believe, if we can drill down to 20 kilometers, we can access these super-hot temperatures in greater than 90 percent of locations across the globe,” Houde says.

      Quaise’s work with the DOE is addressing what it sees as the biggest remaining questions about drilling holes of unprecedented depth and pressure, such as material removal and determining the best casing to keep the hole stable and open. For the latter problem of well stability, Houde believes additional computer modeling is needed and expects to complete that modeling by the end of 2024.

      By drilling the holes at existing power plants, Quaise will be able to move faster than if it had to get permits to build new plants and transmission lines. And by making their millimeter-wave drilling equipment compatible with the existing global fleet of drilling rigs, it will also allow the company to tap into the oil and gas industry’s global workforce.

      “At these high temperatures [we’re accessing], we’re producing steam very close to, if not exceeding, the temperature that today’s coal and gas-fired power plants operate at,” Houde says. “So, we can go to existing power plants and say, ‘We can replace 95 to 100 percent of your coal use by developing a geothermal field and producing steam from the Earth, at the same temperature you’re burning coal to run your turbine, directly replacing carbon emissions.”

      Transforming the world’s energy systems in such a short timeframe is something the founders see as critical to help avoid the most catastrophic global warming scenarios.

      “There have been tremendous gains in renewables over the last decade, but the big picture today is we’re not going nearly fast enough to hit the milestones we need for limiting the worst impacts of climate change,” Houde says. “[Deep geothermal] is a power resource that can scale anywhere and has the ability to tap into a large workforce in the energy industry to readily repackage their skills for a totally carbon free energy source.” More

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      in Energy

      Making hydrogen power a reality

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      For decades, government and industry have looked to hydrogen as a potentially game-changing tool in the quest for clean energy. As far back as the early days of the Clinton administration, energy sector observers and public policy experts have extolled the virtues of hydrogen — to the point that some people have joked that hydrogen is the energy of the future, “and always will be.”

      Even as wind and solar power have become commonplace in recent years, hydrogen has been held back by high costs and other challenges. But the fuel may finally be poised to have its moment. At the MIT Energy Initiative Spring Symposium — entitled “Hydrogen’s role in a decarbonized energy system” — experts discussed hydrogen production routes, hydrogen consumption markets, the path to a robust hydrogen infrastructure, and policy changes needed to achieve a “hydrogen future.”

      During one panel, “Options for producing low-carbon hydrogen at scale,” four experts laid out existing and planned efforts to leverage hydrogen for decarbonization. 

      “The race is on”

      Huyen N. Dinh, a senior scientist and group manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), is the director of HydroGEN, a consortium of several U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories that accelerates research and development of innovative and advanced water splitting materials and technologies for clean, sustainable, and low-cost hydrogen production.

      For the past 14 years, Dinh has worked on fuel cells and hydrogen production for NREL. “We think that the 2020s is the decade of hydrogen,” she said. Dinh believes that the energy carrier is poised to come into its own over the next few years, pointing to several domestic and international activities surrounding the fuel and citing a Hydrogen Council report that projected the future impacts of hydrogen — including 30 million jobs and $2.5 trillion in global revenue by 2050.

      “Now is the time for hydrogen, and the global race is on,” she said.

      Dinh also explained the parameters of the Hydrogen Shot — the first of the DOE’s “Energy Earthshots” aimed at accelerating breakthroughs for affordable and reliable clean energy solutions. Hydrogen fuel currently costs around $5 per kilogram to produce, and the Hydrogen Shot’s stated goal is to bring that down by 80 percent to $1 per kilogram within a decade.

      The Hydrogen Shot will be facilitated by $9.5 billion in funding for at least four clean hydrogen hubs located in different parts of the United States, as well as extensive research and development, manufacturing, and recycling from last year’s bipartisan infrastructure law. Still, Dinh noted that it took more than 40 years for solar and wind power to become cost competitive, and now industry, government, national lab, and academic leaders are hoping to achieve similar reductions in hydrogen fuel costs over a much shorter time frame. In the near term, she said, stakeholders will need to improve the efficiency, durability, and affordability of hydrogen production through electrolysis (using electricity to split water) using today’s renewable and nuclear power sources. Over the long term, the focus may shift to splitting water more directly through heat or solar energy, she said.

      “The time frame is short, the competition is intense, and a coordinated effort is critical for domestic competitiveness,” Dinh said.

      Hydrogen across continents

      Wambui Mutoru, principal engineer for international commercial development, exploration, and production international at the Norwegian global energy company Equinor, said that hydrogen is an important component in the company’s ambitions to be carbon-neutral by 2050. The company, in collaboration with partners, has several hydrogen projects in the works, and Mutoru laid out the company’s Hydrogen to Humber project in Northern England. Currently, the Humber region emits more carbon dioxide than any other industrial cluster in the United Kingdom — 50 percent more, in fact, than the next-largest carbon emitter.   

      “The ambition here is for us to deploy the world’s first at-scale hydrogen value chain to decarbonize the Humber industrial cluster,” Mutoru said.

      The project consists of three components: a clean hydrogen production facility, an onshore hydrogen and carbon dioxide transmission network, and offshore carbon dioxide transportation and storage operations. Mutoru highlighted the importance of carbon capture and storage in hydrogen production. Equinor, she said, has captured and sequestered carbon offshore for more than 25 years, storing more than 25 million tons of carbon dioxide during that time.

      Mutoru also touched on Equinor’s efforts to build a decarbonized energy hub in the Appalachian region of the United States, covering territory in Ohio, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. By 2040, she said, the company’s ambition is to produce about 1.5 million tons of clean hydrogen per year in the region — roughly equivalent to 6.8 gigawatts of electricity — while also storing 30 million tons of carbon dioxide.

      Mutoru acknowledged that the biggest challenge facing potential hydrogen producers is the current lack of viable business models. “Resolving that challenge requires cross-industry collaboration, and supportive policy frameworks so that the market for hydrogen can be built and sustained over the long term,” she said.

      Confronting barriers

      Gretchen Baier, executive external strategy and communications leader for Dow, noted that the company already produces hydrogen in multiple ways. For one, Dow operates the world’s largest ethane cracker, in Texas. An ethane cracker heats ethane to break apart molecular bonds to form ethylene, with hydrogen one of the byproducts of the process. Also, Baier showed a slide of the 1891 patent for the electrolysis of brine water, which also produces hydrogen. The company still engages in this practice, but Dow does not have an effective way of utilizing the resulting hydrogen for their own fuel.

      “Just take a moment to think about that,” Baier said. “We’ve been talking about hydrogen production and the cost of it, and this is basically free hydrogen. And it’s still too much of a barrier to somewhat recycle that and use it for ourselves. The environment is clearly changing, and we do have plans for that, but I think that kind of sets some of the challenges that face industry here.”

      However, Baier said, hydrogen is expected to play a significant role in Dow’s future as the company attempts to decarbonize by 2050. The company, she said, plans to optimize hydrogen allocation and production, retrofit turbines for hydrogen fueling, and purchase clean hydrogen. By 2040, Dow expects more than 60 percent of its sites to be hydrogen-ready.

      Baier noted that hydrogen fuel is not a “panacea,” but rather one among many potential contributors as industry attempts to reduce or eliminate carbon emissions in the coming decades. “Hydrogen has an important role, but it’s not the only answer,” she said.

      “This is real”

      Colleen Wright is vice president of corporate strategy for Constellation, which recently separated from Exelon Corporation. (Exelon now owns the former company’s regulated utilities, such as Commonwealth Edison and Baltimore Gas and Electric, while Constellation owns the competitive generation and supply portions of the business.) Wright stressed the advantages of nuclear power in hydrogen production, which she said include superior economics, low barriers to implementation, and scalability.

      “A quarter of emissions in the world are currently from hard-to-decarbonize sectors — the industrial sector, steel making, heavy-duty transportation, aviation,” she said. “These are really challenging decarbonization sectors, and as we continue to expand and electrify, we’re going to need more supply. We’re also going to need to produce clean hydrogen using emissions-free power.”

      “The scale of nuclear power plants is uniquely suited to be able to scale hydrogen production,” Wright added. She mentioned Constellation’s Nine Mile Point site in the State of New York, which received a DOE grant for a pilot program that will see a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer installed at the site.

      “We’re very excited to see hydrogen go from a [research and development] conversation to a commercial conversation,” she said. “We’ve been calling it a little bit of a ‘middle-school dance.’ Everybody is standing around the circle, waiting to see who’s willing to put something at stake. But this is real. We’re not dancing around the edges. There are a lot of people who are big players, who are willing to put skin in the game today.” More

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      in Energy

      Donald Sadoway wins European Inventor Award for liquid metal batteries

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      MIT Professor Donald Sadoway has won the 2022 European Inventor Award, in the category for Non-European Patent Office Countries, for his work on liquid metal batteries that could enable the long-term storage of renewable energy.

      Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and a longtime supporter and friend of the Materials Research Laboratory.

      “By enabling the large-scale storage of renewable energy, Donald Sadoway’s invention is a huge step towards the deployment of carbon-free electricity generation,” says António Campinos, president of the European Patent Office. “He has spent his career studying electrochemistry and has transformed this expertise into an invention that represents a huge step forward in the transition to green energy.”

      Sadoway was honored at the 2022 European Inventor Award ceremony on June 21. The award is one of Europe’s most prestigious innovation prizes and is presented annually to outstanding inventors from Europe and beyond who have made an exceptional contribution to society, technological progress, and economic growth.

      When accepting the award in Munich, Sadoway told the audience:

      “I am astonished. When I look at all the patented technologies that are represented at this event I see an abundance of excellence, all of them solutions to pressing problems. I wonder if the judges are assessing not only degrees of excellence but degrees of urgency. The liquid metal battery addresses an existential threat to the health of our atmosphere which is related to climate change.

      “By hosting this event the EPO celebrates invention. The thread that connects all the inventors is their efforts to make the world a better place. In my judgment there is no nobler pursuit. So perhaps this is a celebration of nobility.”

      Sadoway’s liquid metal batteries consist of three liquid layers of different densities, which naturally separate in the same way as oil and vinegar do in a salad dressing. The top and bottom layers are made from molten metals, with a middle layer of molten liquid salt.

      To keep the metals liquid, the batteries need to operate at extremely high temperatures, so Sadoway designed a system that is self-heating and insulated, requiring no external heating or cooling. They have a lifespan of more than 20 years, can maintain 99 percent of their capacity over 5,000 charging cycles, and have no combustible materials, meaning there is no fire risk.

      In 2010, with a patent for his invention and support from Bill Gates, Sadoway co-founded Ambri, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts just outside Boston, to develop a commercial product. The company will soon install a unit on a 3,700-acre development for a data center in Nevada. This battery will store energy from a reported 500 megawatts of on-site renewable generation, the same output as a natural gas power plant.

      Born in 1950 into a family of Ukrainian immigrants in Canada, Sadoway studied chemical metallurgy specializing in what he calls “extreme electrochemistry” — chemical reactions in molten salts and liquid metals that have been heated to over 500 degrees Celsius. After earning his BASc, MASc, and PhD, all from the University of Toronto, he joined the faculty at MIT in 1978. More

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      in Environment

      Helping renewable energy projects succeed in local communities

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      Jungwoo Chun makes surprising discoveries about sustainability initiatives by zooming in on local communities.

      His discoveries lie in understanding how renewable energy infrastructure develops at a local level. With so many stakeholders in a community — citizens, government officials, businesses, and other organizations — the development process gets complicated very quickly. Chun works to unpack stakeholder relationships to help local renewable energy projects move forward.

      While his interests today are in local communities around the U.S., Chun comes from a global background. Growing up, his family moved frequently due to his dad’s work. He lived in Seoul, South Korea until elementary school and then hopped from city to city around Asia, spending time in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. When it was time for college, he returned to South Korea, majoring in international studies at Korea University and later completing his master’s there in the same field.

      After graduating, Chun wanted to leverage his international expertise to tackle climate change. So, he pursued a second master’s in international environmental policy with William Moomaw at Tufts University.

      During that time, Chun came across an article on climate change by David Victor, a professor in public policy at the University of California at San Diego. Victor argued that while international efforts to fight climate change are necessary, more tangible progress can be made through local efforts catered to each country. That prompted Chun to think a step further: “What can we do in the local community to make a little bit of a difference, which could add up to something big in the long term?”

      With a renewed direction for his goals, Chun arrived at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, specializing in environmental policy and planning. But he was still missing that final inspirational spark to proactively pursue his goals — until he began working with his primary advisor, Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and director of the Science Impact Collaborative.

      For previous research projects, “I would just do what I was told,” Chun says, but his new advisor “really opened [his] eyes” to being an active member of the community. From the start, Susskind has encouraged Chun to share his research ideas and has shown him how to leverage his research skills for public service. Over the past few years, Chun has also taught several classes with Susskind, learning to approach education thoughtfully for an engaging and equitable classroom. Because of their relationship, Chun now always searches for ways to make a difference through research, teaching, and public service.

      Understanding renewable energy projects at a local level

      For his main dissertation project with Susskind, Chun is studying community-owned solar energy projects, working to understand what makes them successful.

      Often, communities don’t have the required expertise to carry out these projects on their own and instead look to advisory organizations for help. But little research has been done on these organizations and the roles that they play in developing solar energy infrastructure.

      Through over 200 surveys and counting, Chun has discovered that these organizations act as life-long collaborators to communities and are critical in getting community-owned solar projects up and running. At the start of these projects, they walk communities through a mountain of logistics for setting up solar energy infrastructure, including permit applications, budgeting, and contractor employment. After the infrastructure is in place, the organizations stay involved, serving as consultants when needed and sometimes even becoming partners.

      Because of these roles, Chun calls these organizations “intermediaries,” drawing a parallel with roles in in conflict resolution. “But it’s much more than that,” he adds. Intermediaries help local communities “build a movement [for community-owned solar energy projects] … and empower them to be independent and self-sustaining.”

      Chun is also working on another project with Susskind, looking at situations where communities are opposed to renewable energy infrastructure. For this project, Chun is supervising and mentoring a group of five undergraduates. Together, they are trying to pinpoint the reasons behind local opposition to renewable energy projects.

      The idea for this project emerged two years ago, when Chun heard in the news that many solar and wind projects were being delayed or cancelled due to local opposition. But the reasons for this opposition weren’t thoroughly researched.

      “When we started to dig a little deeper, [we found that] communities oppose these projects even though they aren’t opposed to renewable energy,” Chun says. The primary reasons for opposition lie in land use concerns, including financial challenges, health and safety concerns, and ironically, environmental consequences. By better understanding these concerns, Chun hopes to help more renewable energy projects succeed and bring society closer to a sustainable future.

      Bringing research to the classroom and community

      Right now, Chun is looking to bring his research insights on renewable energy infrastructure into the classroom. He’s developing a course on renewable energy that will act as a “clinic” where students will work with communities to understand their concerns for potential renewable energy projects. The students’ findings will then be passed onto project leaders to help them address these concerns.

      This new course is modeled after 11.074/11.274 (Cybersecurity Clinic), which Chun has helped develop over the past few years. In this clinic, students work with local governments in New England to assess potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their digital systems. At first, “a lot of city governments were very skeptical, like ‘students doing service for us…?’” Chun says. “But in the end, they were all very satisfied with the outcome” and found the assessments “impactful.”

      Since the Cybersecurity Clinic has kicked off, other universities have approached Chun and his co-instructors about developing their own regional clinics. Now, there are cybersecurity clinics operating around the world. “That’s been a huge success,” Chun says. Going forward, “we’d like to expand the benefit of this clinic [to address] communities opposing renewable energy [projects].” The new course will be a philosophical trifecta for Chun, combining his commitments to research, teaching, and public service.

      Chun plans to wrap up his PhD at the end of this summer and is currently writing his dissertation on community-owned solar energy projects. “I’m done with all the background work — working the soil and throwing the seeds in the right place,” he says, “It’s now time to gather all the crops and present the work.” More