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      in Energy

      MIT Energy Conference grapples with geopolitics

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      As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s MIT Energy Conference spotlighted the role of geopolitics in the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

      Each year, the student-run conference, which its organizers say is the largest of its kind, brings together leaders from around the globe to discuss humanity’s most pressing energy and sustainability challenges.

      The event always involves perspectives from the investment, business, research, and startup communities. But this year, as more than 600 attendees gathered on April 11 and 12 for a whirlwind of keynote talks, fireside chats, and panel discussions, common themes also included the influence of Russia’s war, rising tensions between the U.S. and China, and international collaboration.

      As participants grappled with the evolving geopolitical landscape, some speakers encouraged moving past isolationist tendencies.

      “Some people push for self-sufficiency, others emphasize that we should not rely on trading partners that don’t share our values — I think both arguments are misguided,” said Juan Carlos Jobet, Chile’s former ministry of energy and mining. “No country has all that’s needed to create an energy system that’s affordable, clean, and secure. … A third of the world’s energy output is generated in nondemocratic countries. Can we really make our energy systems affordable and secure and curb climate change while excluding those countries from our collective effort? If we enter an area of protectionism and disintegration, we will all be worse off.”

      Another theme was optimism, such as that expressed by Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, CEO of Ukraine’s national power company, who spoke to the conference live from Kyiv. Kudrytskyi outlined Russia’s attacks on Ukraine’s power grids, which included more than 1,000 heavy missiles, making it the largest-ever campaign against a country’s power grid.

      Still, Kudrytskyi said he was confident he’d be able to attend the conference in person next year. As it happened, Kudrytskyi’s presentation marked the day Ukraine resumed its energy exports to other countries.

      “The good news is, after all of that, our system survived and continues operations,” he said.

      Energy security and the green transition

      Richard Duke, the U.S. Department of State’s deputy special envoy for climate, opened the conference with a keynote centered on the U.S.’ role in the global shift toward cleaner energy. Duke was among those advocating for a more integrated and diversified global energy system, noting that no country can address climate change on its own.

      “We need to do all of these things in parallel, in concert with other governments, and through the architecture of the Paris Climate agreement that wraps it together in ambitious net greenhouse gas abatement targets,” Duke said.

      Following his talk, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, the European Commission’s director general for energy, discussed the shift in the EU’s energy policies spurred by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

      She admitted the EU had grown too dependent on Russian natural gas, but said the invasion forced European states to revise their energy strategy while keeping their long-term objective of net neutrality by 2050.

      “We see energy security and the green transition as interlinked. There is no energy security without the energy transition toward climate neutrality, and there’s no energy transition without energy security,” Jorgensen said.

      Jørgensen also outlined steps the EU has taken to improve its energy security over the last year, including rolling out additional renewable energy projects and replacing Russian fuel with fuel from the U.S., which has now become the continent’s main supplier of energy.

      “The fight against climate change is our shared ambition, it’s our shared responsibility, and I think we’ve shown over these last few years that we can turn that ambition into action and bring results,” she said.

      A challenge and an opportunity

      Optimism also shone through in the way speakers framed the green energy transition as a business opportunity. In keeping with the idea, the conference included a showcase of more than 30 startups focused on clean energy and sustainability.

      “We’re all battling a huge problem that needs a collective effort,” said Malav Sukhadia of Sol Clarity, a conference exhibitor that uses electricity to clean solar panels as a way to replace water cleaning. “This is one of the best energy conferences in the world. We felt if you’re in climate tech, you have to be here.”

      Technological development was a pillar of the conference, and a big topic in those discussions was green hydrogen, a clean fuel source that could replace natural gas in a number of applications and be produced using renewable energy. In one panel discussion on the technology, Sunita Satyapal of the Department of Energy noted the agency has been funding hydrogen development since the 1970s. Other panel members also stressed the maturity of the technology.

      “A lot of the technology needed to advance the ecosystem exists now,” said Laura Parkan, vice president of hydrogen energy at Air Liquide Americas. “The challenge is to get things to a large enough scale so that the costs come down to make it more affordable and really advance the hydrogen ecosystem.”

      Still, panel members acknowledged more technological development is needed to leverage the full potential of hydrogen, such as better mechanisms for storage and transportation.

      Other advanced technologies mentioned in panel discussions included advanced geothermal energy and small modular nuclear reactors that could be built and deployed more quickly than conventional reactors.

      “Exploring these different technologies may actually get us to the net zero — or even a zero carbon future — that we’re hoping for in electricity generation,” said Emma Wong of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency, noting there are more than 80 advanced reactor designs that have been explored around the world. “There are various challenges and enabling conditions to be addressed, but places like China and Russia are already building these things, so there’s not a technological barrier.”

      “Glass half full”

      Despite the tall tasks that lie ahead, some speakers took a moment to celebrate accomplishments thus far.

      “It’s incredible to think about the progress we’ve made in the last 10 years,” said Neil Brown of the KKR investment firm, whose company is working to build a large offshore wind project. “Solar and wind and electric vehicles have gone from impossibly expensive and hard to imagine penetrating the market to being very close to, if not already at, cost parity. We’ve really come an awful long way.”

      Other speakers mixed their positivity with a confession of envy for the opportunity ahead of the young people in the audience, many of them students from MIT.

      “I have a mix of excitement from the speakers we’ve heard so far and a little bit of envy as well for the open road the young students and professionals here have in front of them,” said Jobert. “Coming back to this place has made me reconnect with the sense of opportunity and responsibility that I felt as a student.”

      Jobert offered lessons learned from his country’s struggles with an energy crisis, populist policies, and severe droughts. His talk finished with questions that struck at the heart of the conference.

      “The evidence is clear: The Earth will change. How much is still to be decided,” Jobert said. “The energy sector has been a central part of the problem. We now must work to become an essential pierce of the solution. Where should we focus our efforts? What can we learn from each other?” More

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      in Energy

      Energy, war, and the crisis in Ukraine

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      Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is having a global impact on many areas of the world today, affecting the balance of power among states and creating a contest between democratic and authoritarian alliances. It is also having a major impact on the global energy supply. European states have scrambled to reorient their consumption away from Russian natural gas, while Russia has used its energy assets as political leverage while finding new economic partners.

      In short, there is also a battle over energy surrounding the invasion, as a panel of experts analyzed at a public MIT event on Friday. The online discussion, “Energy As a Weapon of War,” was the latest Starr Forum, MIT’s prominent event series on foreign policy and international relations.

      The forum’s two featured speakers both discussed energy issues as well as the larger course of the war. Margarita Balmaceda, a professor of diplomacy and international relations at Seton Hall University and an associate of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, listed three key aspects of the energy issue implicated in the invasion.

      In the first place, she noted, European reliance on Russian natural gas is a long-term issue that also existed with the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014, but is only now being managed differently.

      “If we look at the case of Germany … you can see that the temptation of this reliance in particular on Russian natural gas was not simply something that you could ascribe to one or two corrupt politicians,” said Balmaceda, author of the book “Russian Energy Chains: The Remaking of Technopolitics from Siberia to Ukraine to the European Union.” Instead, she said, “it’s something that went to all levels of economic life,” including industrial consumers of natural gas, regional governments, and other stakeholders. 

      Secondly, Balmaceda observed, many core manufacturing industries, especially in Germany, have been particularly dependent on Russian energy, making the need for alternatives something that has direct effects in key production sectors.

      “In my view, the real story, and the story we have to pay much more attention to, has to do with … industrial users of natural gas,” Balmaceda said. In fact, she noted, gas consumption is a major part of the production cycle in Europe’s chemical, cement, steel, and paper industries, supporting about 8 million jobs.

      Finally, Balmaceda observed, European boycotts of Russian energy may have temporarily stymied Russia, but the regime has subsequently found new markets in China, India, and elsewhere.

      “It’s very important to understand that this story does not end in the European Union and North America, and if we don’t deal with the real energy concerns of global South countries, we will not get very far in trying to reduce Russia’s energy power moving forward,” she said.

      Constanze Steinmuller, director and Fritz Stern Chair of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, offered some political context as well as her own perspective on paths forward in the war.

      While policymakers in Europe frequently praise the response of the Biden administration in the U.S., in support of Ukraine, “It’s also remarkable how steadfast the European response has been,” Steinmuller said. She added, “It’s something I was very worried about.” She also praised the German government for “decoupling German dependence from Russian gas and oil imports in ways I honestly would not have thought possible.”

      While the alliance supporting Ukraine has been valuable, Steinmuller said, she believes the U.S. and Europe need to give Ukraine even more backing in terms of weaponry in particular. “It is unclear, at this point still, whether Ukraine will have the means to retain full control over its territory.”

      Meanwhile, Russia’s relationship with China, she added, is profoundly consequential for the long-term trajectory of the war. So far, China has been nominally pledging broad support of Russia while publicly de-escalating the nuclear rhetoric arising from the war. However, Steinmuller added, if China decides to “actively support” Russia militarily, “That would be, I think, the worst game-changer of all, and one that … would be the single greatest challenge that I can envision to our ability to help Ukraine win, and to maintain our own security in Europe.”

      The Starr Forum is organized by MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS). Friday’s event was co-sponsored by MIT’s Security Studies Program and the MIT-Eurasia program, in addition to CIS.

      The event’s moderators were Elizabeth Wood, a professor of history at MIT, author of the 2016 book “Roots of Russia’s War in Ukraine,” and co-director of the MISTI MIT-Eurasia Program; and Carol Saivetz, a senior advisor in MIT’s Security Studies Program and expert on Soviet and Russian foreign policy. Wood and Saivetz have helped host a series of Starr Forum events over the last year scrutinizing several aspects of Russia’s invasion and Ukraine’s defense.  

      Understanding the role of energy in the war “is obviously of critical importance today,” Wood said in her opening remarks. That includes, she noted, “How energy is being used by Russia as a tool of aggression, how Ukraine is suffering from attacks upon its critical infrastructure, and how the alliance of European [states] and the U.S. is responding.” 

      In response to audience questions, the scholars outlined multiple scenarios in which the war could end, either on more favorable terms for Ukraine or in ways that strengthen Russia. One audience member also queried about the extent to which the current war could also be thought of as a “carbon war, or climate war,” in which a move toward clean energy also lessens global dependence on large gas and oil suppliers, such as Russia.

      In response, Balmaceda noted that the ongoing infrastructure development in Ukraine might, in theory, leave it with no choice but to modernize its energy infrastructure (though its own orientation toward fossil fuels represents just a small portion of global demand). Steinmuller added that “Ukraine will need much more than just to reorient its energy [demand]. … It will have to change its role in the global economy,” given its own industrial reliance on coal and other fossil fuels.

      Overall, Balmaceda added, “Regardless of whether Russia wins this conflict or loses, the rottenness within Russia is deep enough to be bad news for all of us for a long time.” For her part, Steinmuller underscored again how vital increased alliance support would be.

      “We should show that we are willing and able to defend not just a country that has been attacked by a great power, but willing to defend ourselves,” Steinmuller said. Otherwise, she added, “If we didn’t do that, we would have set for all the world to see a precedent of giving in to blackmail, including nuclear blackmail, and allowing this to happen without us being willing to see the defense of Ukraine through to the end.” More

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      in Environment

      A new approach to preventing human-induced earthquakes

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      When humans pump large volumes of fluid into the ground, they can set off potentially damaging earthquakes, depending on the underlying geology. This has been the case in certain oil- and gas-producing regions, where wastewater, often mixed with oil, is disposed of by injecting it back into the ground — a process that has triggered sizable seismic events in recent years.

      Now MIT researchers, working with an interdisciplinary team of scientists from industry and academia, have developed a method to manage such human-induced seismicity, and have demonstrated that the technique successfully reduced the number of earthquakes occurring in an active oil field.

      Their results, appearing today in Nature, could help mitigate earthquakes caused by the oil and gas industry, not just from the injection of wastewater produced with oil, but also that produced from hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” The team’s approach could also help prevent quakes from other human activities, such as the filling of water reservoirs and aquifers, and the sequestration of carbon dioxide in deep geologic formations.

      “Triggered seismicity is a problem that goes way beyond producing oil,” says study lead author Bradford Hager, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Earth Sciences in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “This is a huge problem for society that will have to be confronted if we are to safely inject carbon dioxide into the subsurface. We demonstrated the kind of study that will be necessary for doing this.”

      The study’s co-authors include Ruben Juanes, professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and collaborators from the University of California at Riverside, the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University, and Eni, a multinational oil and gas company based in Italy.

      Safe injections

      Both natural and human-induced earthquakes occur along geologic faults, or fractures between two blocks of rock in the Earth’s crust. In stable periods, the rocks on either side of a fault are held in place by the pressures generated by surrounding rocks. But when a large volume of fluid is suddenly injected at high rates, it can upset a fault’s fluid stress balance. In some cases, this sudden injection can lubricate a fault and cause rocks on either side to slip and trigger an earthquake.

      The most common source of such fluid injections is from the oil and gas industry’s disposal of wastewater that is brought up along with oil. Field operators dispose of this water through injection wells that continuously pump the water back into the ground at high pressures.

      “There’s a lot of water produced with the oil, and that water is injected into the ground, which has caused a large number of quakes,” Hager notes. “So, for a while, oil-producing regions in Oklahoma had more magnitude 3 quakes than California, because of all this wastewater that was being injected.”

      In recent years, a similar problem arose in southern Italy, where injection wells on oil fields operated by Eni triggered microseisms in an area where large naturally occurring earthquakes had previously occurred. The company, looking for ways to address the problem, sought consulation from Hager and Juanes, both leading experts in seismicity and subsurface flows.

      “This was an opportunity for us to get access to high-quality seismic data about the subsurface, and learn how to do these injections safely,” Juanes says.

      Seismic blueprint

      The team made use of detailed information, accumulated by the oil company over years of operation in the Val D’Agri oil field, a region of southern Italy that lies in a tectonically active basin. The data included information about the region’s earthquake record, dating back to the 1600s, as well as the structure of rocks and faults, and the state of the subsurface corresponding to the various injection rates of each well.

      This video shows the change in stress on the geologic faults of the Val d’Agri field from 2001 to 2019, as predicted by a new MIT-derived model. Video credit: A. Plesch (Harvard University)

      This video shows small earthquakes occurring on the Costa Molina fault within the Val d’Agri field from 2004 to 2016. Each event is shown for two years fading from an initial bright color to the final dark color. Video credit: A. Plesch (Harvard University)

      The researchers integrated these data into a coupled subsurface flow and geomechanical model, which predicts how the stresses and strains of underground structures evolve as the volume of pore fluid, such as from the injection of water, changes. They connected this model to an earthquake mechanics model in order to translate the changes in underground stress and fluid pressure into a likelihood of triggering earthquakes. They then quantified the rate of earthquakes associated with various rates of water injection, and identified scenarios that were unlikely to trigger large quakes.

      When they ran the models using data from 1993 through 2016, the predictions of seismic activity matched with the earthquake record during this period, validating their approach. They then ran the models forward in time, through the year 2025, to predict the region’s seismic response to three different injection rates: 2,000, 2,500, and 3,000 cubic meters per day. The simulations showed that large earthquakes could be avoided if operators kept injection rates at 2,000 cubic meters per day — a flow rate comparable to a small public fire hydrant.

      Eni field operators implemented the team’s recommended rate at the oil field’s single water injection well over a 30-month period between January 2017 and June 2019. In this time, the team observed only a few tiny seismic events, which coincided with brief periods when operators went above the recommended injection rate.

      “The seismicity in the region has been very low in these two-and-a-half years, with around four quakes of 0.5 magnitude, as opposed to hundreds of quakes, of up to 3 magnitude, that were happening between 2006 and 2016,” Hager says. 

      The results demonstrate that operators can successfully manage earthquakes by adjusting injection rates, based on the underlying geology. Juanes says the team’s modeling approach may help to prevent earthquakes related to other processes, such as the building of water reservoirs and the sequestration of carbon dioxide — as long as there is detailed information about a region’s subsurface.

      “A lot of effort needs to go into understanding the geologic setting,” says Juanes, who notes that, if carbon sequestration were carried out on depleted oil fields, “such reservoirs could have this type of history, seismic information, and geologic interpretation that you could use to build similar models for carbon sequestration. We show it’s at least possible to manage seismicity in an operational setting. And we offer a blueprint for how to do it.”

      This research was supported, in part, by Eni. More