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      in Energy

      Extracting hydrogen from rocks

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      It’s commonly thought that the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen, exists mainly alongside other elements — with oxygen in water, for example, and with carbon in methane. But naturally occurring underground pockets of pure hydrogen are punching holes in that notion — and generating attention as a potentially unlimited source of carbon-free power. One interested party is the U.S. Department of Energy, which last month awarded $20 million in research grants to 18 teams from laboratories, universities, and private companies to develop technologies that can lead to cheap, clean fuel from the subsurface. Geologic hydrogen, as it’s known, is produced when water reacts with iron-rich rocks, causing the iron to oxidize. One of the grant recipients, MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim Abate’s research group, will use its $1.3 million grant to determine the ideal conditions for producing hydrogen underground — considering factors such as catalysts to initiate the chemical reaction, temperature, pressure, and pH levels. The goal is to improve efficiency for large-scale production, meeting global energy needs at a competitive cost. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are potentially billions of tons of geologic hydrogen buried in the Earth’s crust. Accumulations have been discovered worldwide, and a slew of startups are searching for extractable deposits. Abate is looking to jump-start the natural hydrogen production process, implementing “proactive” approaches that involve stimulating production and harvesting the gas.                                                                                                                         “We aim to optimize the reaction parameters to make the reaction faster and produce hydrogen in an economically feasible manner,” says Abate, the Chipman Development Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). Abate’s research centers on designing materials and technologies for the renewable energy transition, including next-generation batteries and novel chemical methods for energy storage. 

      Sparking innovation

      Interest in geologic hydrogen is growing at a time when governments worldwide are seeking carbon-free energy alternatives to oil and gas. In December, French President Emmanuel Macron said his government would provide funding to explore natural hydrogen. And in February, government and private sector witnesses briefed U.S. lawmakers on opportunities to extract hydrogen from the ground. Today commercial hydrogen is manufactured at $2 a kilogram, mostly for fertilizer and chemical and steel production, but most methods involve burning fossil fuels, which release Earth-heating carbon. “Green hydrogen,” produced with renewable energy, is promising, but at $7 per kilogram, it’s expensive. “If you get hydrogen at a dollar a kilo, it’s competitive with natural gas on an energy-price basis,” says Douglas Wicks, a program director at Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E), the Department of Energy organization leading the geologic hydrogen grant program. Recipients of the ARPA-E grants include Colorado School of Mines, Texas Tech University, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, plus private companies including Koloma, a hydrogen production startup that has received funding from Amazon and Bill Gates. The projects themselves are diverse, ranging from applying industrial oil and gas methods for hydrogen production and extraction to developing models to understand hydrogen formation in rocks. The purpose: to address questions in what Wicks calls a “total white space.” “In geologic hydrogen, we don’t know how we can accelerate the production of it, because it’s a chemical reaction, nor do we really understand how to engineer the subsurface so that we can safely extract it,” Wicks says. “We’re trying to bring in the best skills of each of the different groups to work on this under the idea that the ensemble should be able to give us good answers in a fairly rapid timeframe.” Geochemist Viacheslav Zgonnik, one of the foremost experts in the natural hydrogen field, agrees that the list of unknowns is long, as is the road to the first commercial projects. But he says efforts to stimulate hydrogen production — to harness the natural reaction between water and rock — present “tremendous potential.” “The idea is to find ways we can accelerate that reaction and control it so we can produce hydrogen on demand in specific places,” says Zgonnik, CEO and founder of Natural Hydrogen Energy, a Denver-based startup that has mineral leases for exploratory drilling in the United States. “If we can achieve that goal, it means that we can potentially replace fossil fuels with stimulated hydrogen.”

      “A full-circle moment”

      For Abate, the connection to the project is personal. As a child in his hometown in Ethiopia, power outages were a usual occurrence — the lights would be out three, maybe four days a week. Flickering candles or pollutant-emitting kerosene lamps were often the only source of light for doing homework at night. “And for the household, we had to use wood and charcoal for chores such as cooking,” says Abate. “That was my story all the way until the end of high school and before I came to the U.S. for college.” In 1987, well-diggers drilling for water in Mali in Western Africa uncovered a natural hydrogen deposit, causing an explosion. Decades later, Malian entrepreneur Aliou Diallo and his Canadian oil and gas company tapped the well and used an engine to burn hydrogen and power electricity in the nearby village. Ditching oil and gas, Diallo launched Hydroma, the world’s first hydrogen exploration enterprise. The company is drilling wells near the original site that have yielded high concentrations of the gas. “So, what used to be known as an energy-poor continent now is generating hope for the future of the world,” Abate says. “Learning about that was a full-circle moment for me. Of course, the problem is global; the solution is global. But then the connection with my personal journey, plus the solution coming from my home continent, makes me personally connected to the problem and to the solution.”

      Experiments that scale

      Abate and researchers in his lab are formulating a recipe for a fluid that will induce the chemical reaction that triggers hydrogen production in rocks. The main ingredient is water, and the team is testing “simple” materials for catalysts that will speed up the reaction and in turn increase the amount of hydrogen produced, says postdoc Yifan Gao. “Some catalysts are very costly and hard to produce, requiring complex production or preparation,” Gao says. “A catalyst that’s inexpensive and abundant will allow us to enhance the production rate — that way, we produce it at an economically feasible rate, but also with an economically feasible yield.” The iron-rich rocks in which the chemical reaction happens can be found across the United States and the world. To optimize the reaction across a diversity of geological compositions and environments, Abate and Gao are developing what they call a high-throughput system, consisting of artificial intelligence software and robotics, to test different catalyst mixtures and simulate what would happen when applied to rocks from various regions, with different external conditions like temperature and pressure. “And from that we measure how much hydrogen we are producing for each possible combination,” Abate says. “Then the AI will learn from the experiments and suggest to us, ‘Based on what I’ve learned and based on the literature, I suggest you test this composition of catalyst material for this rock.’” The team is writing a paper on its project and aims to publish its findings in the coming months. The next milestones for the project, after developing the catalyst recipe, is designing a reactor that will serve two purposes. First, fitted with technologies such as Raman spectroscopy, it will allow researchers to identify and optimize the chemical conditions that lead to improved rates and yield of hydrogen production. The lab-scale device will also inform the design of a real-world reactor that can accelerate hydrogen production in the field. “That would be a plant-scale reactor that would be implanted into the subsurface,” Abate says. The cross-disciplinary project is also tapping the expertise of Yang Shao-Horn, of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and DMSE, for computational analysis of the catalyst, and Esteban Gazel, a Cornell University scientist who will lend his expertise in geology and geochemistry. He’ll focus on understanding the iron-rich ultramafic rock formations across the United States and the globe and how they react with water. For Wicks at ARPA-E, the questions Abate and the other grant recipients are asking are just the first, critical steps in uncharted energy territory. “If we can understand how to stimulate these rocks into generating hydrogen, safely getting it up, it really unleashes the potential energy source,” he says. Then the emerging industry will look to oil and gas for the drilling, piping, and gas extraction know-how. “As I like to say, this is enabling technology that we hope to, in a very short term, enable us to say, ‘Is there really something there?’” More

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      in Energy

      Propelling atomically layered magnets toward green computers

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      Globally, computation is booming at an unprecedented rate, fueled by the boons of artificial intelligence. With this, the staggering energy demand of the world’s computing infrastructure has become a major concern, and the development of computing devices that are far more energy-efficient is a leading challenge for the scientific community. 

      Use of magnetic materials to build computing devices like memories and processors has emerged as a promising avenue for creating “beyond-CMOS” computers, which would use far less energy compared to traditional computers. Magnetization switching in magnets can be used in computation the same way that a transistor switches from open or closed to represent the 0s and 1s of binary code. 

      While much of the research along this direction has focused on using bulk magnetic materials, a new class of magnetic materials — called two-dimensional van der Waals magnets — provides superior properties that can improve the scalability and energy efficiency of magnetic devices to make them commercially viable. 

      Although the benefits of shifting to 2D magnetic materials are evident, their practical induction into computers has been hindered by some fundamental challenges. Until recently, 2D magnetic materials could operate only at very low temperatures, much like superconductors. So bringing their operating temperatures above room temperature has remained a primary goal. Additionally, for use in computers, it is important that they can be controlled electrically, without the need for magnetic fields. Bridging this fundamental gap, where 2D magnetic materials can be electrically switched above room temperature without any magnetic fields, could potentially catapult the translation of 2D magnets into the next generation of “green” computers.

      A team of MIT researchers has now achieved this critical milestone by designing a “van der Waals atomically layered heterostructure” device where a 2D van der Waals magnet, iron gallium telluride, is interfaced with another 2D material, tungsten ditelluride. In an open-access paper published March 15 in Science Advances, the team shows that the magnet can be toggled between the 0 and 1 states simply by applying pulses of electrical current across their two-layer device. 

      Play video

      The Future of Spintronics: Manipulating Spins in Atomic Layers without External Magnetic FieldsVideo: Deblina Sarkar

      “Our device enables robust magnetization switching without the need for an external magnetic field, opening up unprecedented opportunities for ultra-low power and environmentally sustainable computing technology for big data and AI,” says lead author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Assistant Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Center for Neurobiological Engineering, and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group. “Moreover, the atomically layered structure of our device provides unique capabilities including improved interface and possibilities of gate voltage tunability, as well as flexible and transparent spintronic technologies.”

      Sarkar is joined on the paper by first author Shivam Kajale, a graduate student in Sarkar’s research group at the Media Lab; Thanh Nguyen, a graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE); Nguyen Tuan Hung, an MIT visiting scholar in NSE and an assistant professor at Tohoku University in Japan; and Mingda Li, associate professor of NSE.

      Breaking the mirror symmetries 

      When electric current flows through heavy metals like platinum or tantalum, the electrons get segregated in the materials based on their spin component, a phenomenon called the spin Hall effect, says Kajale. The way this segregation happens depends on the material, and particularly its symmetries.

      “The conversion of electric current to spin currents in heavy metals lies at the heart of controlling magnets electrically,” Kajale notes. “The microscopic structure of conventionally used materials, like platinum, have a kind of mirror symmetry, which restricts the spin currents only to in-plane spin polarization.”

      Kajale explains that two mirror symmetries must be broken to produce an “out-of-plane” spin component that can be transferred to a magnetic layer to induce field-free switching. “Electrical current can ‘break’ the mirror symmetry along one plane in platinum, but its crystal structure prevents the mirror symmetry from being broken in a second plane.”

      In their earlier experiments, the researchers used a small magnetic field to break the second mirror plane. To get rid of the need for a magnetic nudge, Kajale and Sarkar and colleagues looked instead for a material with a structure that could break the second mirror plane without outside help. This led them to another 2D material, tungsten ditelluride. The tungsten ditelluride that the researchers used has an orthorhombic crystal structure. The material itself has one broken mirror plane. Thus, by applying current along its low-symmetry axis (parallel to the broken mirror plane), the resulting spin current has an out-of-plane spin component that can directly induce switching in the ultra-thin magnet interfaced with the tungsten ditelluride. 

      “Because it’s also a 2D van der Waals material, it can also ensure that when we stack the two materials together, we get pristine interfaces and a good flow of electron spins between the materials,” says Kajale. 

      Becoming more energy-efficient 

      Computer memory and processors built from magnetic materials use less energy than traditional silicon-based devices. And the van der Waals magnets can offer higher energy efficiency and better scalability compared to bulk magnetic material, the researchers note. 

      The electrical current density used for switching the magnet translates to how much energy is dissipated during switching. A lower density means a much more energy-efficient material. “The new design has one of the lowest current densities in van der Waals magnetic materials,” Kajale says. “This new design has an order of magnitude lower in terms of the switching current required in bulk materials. This translates to something like two orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency.”

      The research team is now looking at similar low-symmetry van der Waals materials to see if they can reduce current density even further. They are also hoping to collaborate with other researchers to find ways to manufacture the 2D magnetic switch devices at commercial scale. 

      This work was carried out, in part, using the facilities at MIT.nano. It was funded by the Media Lab, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy. More

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      in Environment

      Shining a light on oil fields to make them more sustainable

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      Operating an oil field is complex and there is a staggeringly long list of things that can go wrong.

      One of the most common problems is spills of the salty brine that’s a toxic byproduct of pumping oil. Another is over- or under-pumping that can lead to machine failure and methane leaks. (The oil and gas industry is the largest industrial emitter of methane in the U.S.) Then there are extreme weather events, which range from winter frosts to blazing heat, that can put equipment out of commission for months. One of the wildest problems Sebastien Mannai SM ’14, PhD ’18 has encountered are hogs that pop open oil tanks with their snouts to enjoy on-demand oil baths.

      Mannai helps oil field owners detect and respond to these problems while optimizing the operation of their machinery to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place. He is the founder and CEO of Amplified Industries, a company selling oil field monitoring and control tools that help make the industry more efficient and sustainable.

      Amplified Industries’ sensors and analytics give oil well operators real-time alerts when things go wrong, allowing them to respond to issues before they become disasters.

      “We’re able to find 99 percent of the issues affecting these machines, from mechanical failures to human errors, including issues happening thousands of feet underground,” Mannai explains. “With our AI solution, operators can put the wells on autopilot, and the system automatically adjusts or shuts the well down as soon as there’s an issue.”

      Amplified currently works with private companies in states spanning from Texas to Wyoming, that own and operate as many as 3,000 wells. Such companies make up the majority of oil well operators in the U.S. and operate both new and older, more failure-prone equipment that has been in the field for decades.

      Such operators also have a harder time responding to environmental regulations like the Environmental Protection Agency’s new methane guidelines, which seek to dramatically reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas in the industry over the next few years.

      “These operators don’t want to be releasing methane,” Mannai explains. “Additionally, when gas gets into the pumping equipment, it leads to premature failures. We can detect gas and slow the pump down to prevent it. It’s the best of both worlds: The operators benefit because their machines are working better, saving them money while also giving them a smaller environmental footprint with fewer spills and methane leaks.”

      Leveraging “every MIT resource I possibly could”

      Mannai learned about the cutting-edge technology used in the space and aviation industries as he pursued his master’s degree at the Gas Turbine Laboratory in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Then, during his PhD at MIT, he worked with an oil services company and discovered the oil and gas industry was still relying on decades-old technologies and equipment.

      “When I first traveled to the field, I could not believe how old-school the actual operations were,” says Mannai, who has previously worked in rocket engine and turbine factories. “A lot of oil wells have to be adjusted by feel and rules of thumb. The operators have been let down by industrial automation and data companies.”

      Monitoring oil wells for problems typically requires someone in a pickup truck to drive hundreds of miles between wells looking for obvious issues, Mannai says. The sensors that are deployed are expensive and difficult to replace. Over time, they’re also often damaged in the field to the point of being unusable, forcing technicians to make educated guesses about the status of each well.

      “We often see that equipment unplugged or programmed incorrectly because it is incredibly over-complicated and ill-designed for the reality of the field,” Mannai says. “Workers on the ground often have to rip it out and bypass the control system to pump by hand. That’s how you end up with so many spills and wells pumping at suboptimal levels.”

      To build a better oil field monitoring system, Mannai received support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund and the Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). He also participated in the delta V summer accelerator at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, the fuse program during IAP, and the MIT I-Corps program, and took a number of classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2019, Amplified Industries — which operated under the name Acoustic Wells until recently — won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition.

      “My approach was to sign up to every possible entrepreneurship related program and to leverage every MIT resource I possibly could,” Mannai says. “MIT was amazing for us.”

      Mannai officially launched the company after his postdoc at MIT, and Amplified raised its first round of funding in early 2020. That year, Amplified’s small team moved into the Greentown Labs startup incubator in Somerville.

      Mannai says building the company’s battery-powered, low-cost sensors was a huge challenge. The sensors run machine-learning inference models and their batteries last for 10 years. They also had to be able to handle extreme conditions, from the scorching hot New Mexico desert to the swamps of Louisiana and the freezing cold winters in North Dakota.

      “We build very rugged, resilient hardware; it’s a must in those environments” Mannai says. “But it’s also very simple to deploy, so if a device does break, it’s like changing a lightbulb: We ship them a new one and it takes them a couple of minutes to swap it out.”

      Customers equip each well with four or five of Amplified’s sensors, which attach to the well’s cables and pipes to measure variables like tension, pressure, and amps. Vast amounts of data are then sent to Amplified’s cloud and processed by their analytics engine. Signal processing methods and AI models are used to diagnose problems and control the equipment in real-time, while generating notifications for the operators when something goes wrong. Operators can then remotely adjust the well or shut it down.

      “That’s where AI is important, because if you just record everything and put it in a giant dashboard, you create way more work for people,” Mannai says. “The critical part is the ability to process and understand this newly recorded data and make it readily usable in the real world.”

      Amplified’s dashboard is customized for different people in the company, so field technicians can quickly respond to problems and managers or owners can get a high-level view of how everything is running.

      Mannai says often when Amplified’s sensors are installed, they’ll immediately start detecting problems that were unknown to engineers and technicians in the field. To date, Amplified has prevented hundreds of thousands of gallons worth of brine water spills, which are particularly damaging to surrounding vegetation because of their high salt and sulfur content.

      Preventing those spills is only part of Amplified’s positive environmental impact; the company is now turning its attention toward the detection of methane leaks.

      Helping a changing industry

      The EPA’s proposed new Waste Emissions Charge for oil and gas companies would start at $900 per metric ton of reported methane emissions in 2024 and increase to $1,500 per metric ton in 2026 and beyond.

      Mannai says Amplified is well-positioned to help companies comply with the new rules. Its equipment has already showed it can detect various kinds of leaks across the field, purely based on analytics of existing data.

      “Detecting methane leaks typically requires someone to walk around every valve and piece of piping with a thermal camera or sniffer, but these operators often have thousands of valves and hundreds of miles of pipes,” Mannai says. “What we see in the field is that a lot of times people don’t know where the pipes are because oil wells change owners so frequently, or they will miss an intermittent leak.”

      Ultimately Mannai believes a strong data backend and modernized sensing equipment will become the backbone of the industry, and is a necessary prerequisite to both improving efficiency and cleaning up the industry.

      “We’re selling a service that ensures your equipment is working optimally all the time,” Mannai says. “That means a lot fewer fines from the EPA, but it also means better-performing equipment. There’s a mindset change happening across the industry, and we’re helping make that transition as easy and affordable as possible.” More

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      in Energy

      A delicate dance

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      In early 2022, economist Catherine Wolfram was at her desk in the U.S. Treasury building. She could see the east wing of the White House, just steps away.

      Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and Wolfram was thinking about Russia, oil, and sanctions. She and her colleagues had been tasked with figuring out how to restrict the revenues that Russia was using to fuel its brutal war while keeping Russian oil available and affordable to the countries that depended on it.

      Now the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at MIT, Wolfram was on leave from academia to serve as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics.

      Working for Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Wolfram and her colleagues developed dozens of models and forecasts and projections. It struck her, she said later, that “huge decisions [affecting the global economy] would be made on the basis of spreadsheets that I was helping create.” Wolfram composed a memo to the Biden administration and hoped her projections would pan out the way she believed they would.

      Tackling conundrums that weigh competing, sometimes contradictory, interests has defined much of Wolfram’s career.

      Wolfram specializes in the economics of energy markets. She looks at ways to decarbonize global energy systems while recognizing that energy drives economic development, especially in the developing world.

      “The way we’re currently making energy is contributing to climate change. There’s a delicate dance we have to do to make sure that we treat this important industry carefully, but also transform it rapidly to a cleaner, decarbonized system,” she says.

      Economists as influencers

      While Wolfram was growing up in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, her father was a law professor and her mother taught English as a second language. Her mother helped spawn Wolfram’s interest in other cultures and her love of travel, but it was an experience closer to home that sparked her awareness of the effect of human activities on the state of the planet.

      Minnesota’s nickname is “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Wolfram remembers swimming in a nearby lake sometimes covered by a thick sludge of algae. “Thinking back on it, it must’ve had to do with fertilizer runoff,” she says. “That was probably the first thing that made me think about the environment and policy.”

      In high school, Wolfram liked “the fact that you could use math to understand the world. I also was interested in the types of questions about human behavior that economists were thinking about.

      “I definitely think economics is good at sussing out how different actors are likely to react to a particular policy and then designing policies with that in mind.”

      After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1989, Wolfram worked with a Massachusetts agency that governed rate hikes for utilities. Seeing its reliance on research, she says, illuminated the role academics could play in policy setting. It made her think she could make a difference from within academia.

      While pursuing a PhD in economics from MIT, Wolfram counted Paul L. Joskow, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics and former director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Nancy L. Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics, among her mentors and influencers.

      After spending 1996 to 2000 as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard, she joined the faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

      At Berkeley, it struck Wolfram that while she labored over ways to marginally boost the energy efficiency of U.S. power plants, the economies of China and India were growing rapidly, with a corresponding growth in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. “It hit home that to understand the climate issue, I needed to understand energy demand in the developing world,” she says.

      The problem was that the developing world didn’t always offer up the kind of neatly packaged, comprehensive data economists relied on. She wondered if, by relying on readily accessible data, the field was looking under the lamppost — while losing sight of what the rest of the street looked like.

      To make up for a lack of available data on the state of electrification in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, Wolfram developed and administered surveys to individual, remote rural households using on-the-ground field teams.

      Her results suggested that in the world’s poorest countries, the challenges involved in expanding the grid in rural areas should be weighed against potentially greater economic and social returns on investments in the transportation, education, or health sectors.

      Taking the lead

      Within months of Wolfram’s memo to the Biden administration, leaders of the intergovernmental political forum Group of Seven (G7) agreed to the price cap. Tankers from coalition countries would only transport Russian crude sold at or below the price cap level, initially set at $60 per barrel.

      “A price cap was not something that had ever been done before,” Wolfram says. “In some ways, we were making it up out of whole cloth. It was exciting to see that I wrote one of the original memos about it, and then literally three-and-a-half months later, the G7 was making an announcement.

      “As economists and as policymakers, we must set the parameters and get the incentives right. The price cap was basically asking developing countries to buy cheap oil, which was consistent with their incentives.”

      In May 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury reported that despite widespread initial skepticism about the price cap, market participants and geopolitical analysts believe it is accomplishing its goals of restricting Russia’s oil revenues while maintaining the supply of Russian oil and keeping energy costs in check for consumers and businesses around the world.

      Wolfram held the U.S. Treasury post from March 2021 to October 2022 while on leave from UC Berkeley. In July 2023, she joined MIT Sloan School of Management partly to be geographically closer to the policymakers of the nation’s capital. She’s also excited about the work taking place elsewhere at the Institute to stay ahead of climate change.

      Her time in D.C. was eye-opening, particularly in terms of the leadership power of the United States. She worries that the United States is falling prey to “lost opportunities” in terms of addressing climate change. “We were showing real leadership on the price cap, and if we could only do that on climate, I think we could make faster inroads on a global agreement,” she says.

      Now focused on structuring global agreements in energy policy among developed and developing countries, she’s considering how the United States can take advantage of its position as a world leader. “We need to be thinking about how what we do in the U.S. affects the rest of the world from a climate perspective. We can’t go it alone.

      “The U.S. needs to be more aligned with the European Union, Canada, and Japan to try to find areas where we’re taking a common approach to addressing climate change,” she says. She will touch on some of those areas in the class she will teach in spring 2024 titled “Climate and Energy in the Global Economy,” offered through MIT Sloan.

      Looking ahead, she says, “I’m a techno optimist. I believe in human innovation. I’m optimistic that we’ll find ways to live with climate change and, hopefully, ways to minimize it.”

      This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Energy

      Engineers find a new way to convert carbon dioxide into useful products

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      MIT chemical engineers have devised an efficient way to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide, a chemical precursor that can be used to generate useful compounds such as ethanol and other fuels.

      If scaled up for industrial use, this process could help to remove carbon dioxide from power plants and other sources, reducing the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere.

      “This would allow you to take carbon dioxide from emissions or dissolved in the ocean, and convert it into profitable chemicals. It’s really a path forward for decarbonization because we can take CO2, which is a greenhouse gas, and turn it into things that are useful for chemical manufacture,” says Ariel Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the study.

      The new approach uses electricity to perform the chemical conversion, with help from a catalyst that is tethered to the electrode surface by strands of DNA. This DNA acts like Velcro to keep all the reaction components in close proximity, making the reaction much more efficient than if all the components were floating in solution.

      Furst has started a company called Helix Carbon to further develop the technology. Former MIT postdoc Gang Fan is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society Au. Other authors include Nathan Corbin PhD ’21, Minju Chung PhD ’23, former MIT postdocs Thomas Gill and Amruta Karbelkar, and Evan Moore ’23.

      Breaking down CO2

      Converting carbon dioxide into useful products requires first turning it into carbon monoxide. One way to do this is with electricity, but the amount of energy required for that type of electrocatalysis is prohibitively expensive.

      To try to bring down those costs, researchers have tried using electrocatalysts, which can speed up the reaction and reduce the amount of energy that needs to be added to the system. One type of catalyst used for this reaction is a class of molecules known as porphyrins, which contain metals such as iron or cobalt and are similar in structure to the heme molecules that carry oxygen in blood. 

      During this type of electrochemical reaction, carbon dioxide is dissolved in water within an electrochemical device, which contains an electrode that drives the reaction. The catalysts are also suspended in the solution. However, this setup isn’t very efficient because the carbon dioxide and the catalysts need to encounter each other at the electrode surface, which doesn’t happen very often.

      To make the reaction occur more frequently, which would boost the efficiency of the electrochemical conversion, Furst began working on ways to attach the catalysts to the surface of the electrode. DNA seemed to be the ideal choice for this application.

      “DNA is relatively inexpensive, you can modify it chemically, and you can control the interaction between two strands by changing the sequences,” she says. “It’s like a sequence-specific Velcro that has very strong but reversible interactions that you can control.”

      To attach single strands of DNA to a carbon electrode, the researchers used two “chemical handles,” one on the DNA and one on the electrode. These handles can be snapped together, forming a permanent bond. A complementary DNA sequence is then attached to the porphyrin catalyst, so that when the catalyst is added to the solution, it will bind reversibly to the DNA that’s already attached to the electrode — just like Velcro.

      Once this system is set up, the researchers apply a potential (or bias) to the electrode, and the catalyst uses this energy to convert carbon dioxide in the solution into carbon monoxide. The reaction also generates a small amount of hydrogen gas, from the water. After the catalysts wear out, they can be released from the surface by heating the system to break the reversible bonds between the two DNA strands, and replaced with new ones.

      An efficient reaction

      Using this approach, the researchers were able to boost the Faradaic efficiency of the reaction to 100 percent, meaning that all of the electrical energy that goes into the system goes directly into the chemical reactions, with no energy wasted. When the catalysts are not tethered by DNA, the Faradaic efficiency is only about 40 percent.

      This technology could be scaled up for industrial use fairly easily, Furst says, because the carbon electrodes the researchers used are much less expensive than conventional metal electrodes. The catalysts are also inexpensive, as they don’t contain any precious metals, and only a small concentration of the catalyst is needed on the electrode surface.

      By swapping in different catalysts, the researchers plan to try making other products such as methanol and ethanol using this approach. Helix Carbon, the company started by Furst, is also working on further developing the technology for potential commercial use.

      The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Program, the MIT Energy Initiative, and the MIT Deshpande Center. More

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      in Environment

      Artificial reef designed by MIT engineers could protect marine life, reduce storm damage

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      The beautiful, gnarled, nooked-and-crannied reefs that surround tropical islands serve as a marine refuge and natural buffer against stormy seas. But as the effects of climate change bleach and break down coral reefs around the world, and extreme weather events become more common, coastal communities are left increasingly vulnerable to frequent flooding and erosion.

      An MIT team is now hoping to fortify coastlines with “architected” reefs — sustainable, offshore structures engineered to mimic the wave-buffering effects of natural reefs while also providing pockets for fish and other marine life.

      The team’s reef design centers on a cylindrical structure surrounded by four rudder-like slats. The engineers found that when this structure stands up against a wave, it efficiently breaks the wave into turbulent jets that ultimately dissipate most of the wave’s total energy. The team has calculated that the new design could reduce as much wave energy as existing artificial reefs, using 10 times less material.

      The researchers plan to fabricate each cylindrical structure from sustainable cement, which they would mold in a pattern of “voxels” that could be automatically assembled, and would provide pockets for fish to explore and other marine life to settle in. The cylinders could be connected to form a long, semipermeable wall, which the engineers could erect along a coastline, about half a mile from shore. Based on the team’s initial experiments with lab-scale prototypes, the architected reef could reduce the energy of incoming waves by more than 95 percent.

      “This would be like a long wave-breaker,” says Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Professor in Ocean Science and Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “If waves are 6 meters high coming toward this reef structure, they would be ultimately less than a meter high on the other side. So, this kills the impact of the waves, which could prevent erosion and flooding.”

      Details of the architected reef design are reported today in a study appearing in the open-access journal PNAS Nexus. Triantafyllou’s MIT co-authors are Edvard Ronglan SM ’23; graduate students Alfonso Parra Rubio, Jose del Auila Ferrandis, and Erik Strand; research scientists Patricia Maria Stathatou and Carolina Bastidas; and Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms; along with Alexis Oliveira Da Silva at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris, Dixia Fan of Westlake University, and Jeffrey Gair Jr. of Scinetics, Inc.

      Leveraging turbulence

      Some regions have already erected artificial reefs to protect their coastlines from encroaching storms. These structures are typically sunken ships, retired oil and gas platforms, and even assembled configurations of concrete, metal, tires, and stones. However, there’s variability in the types of artificial reefs that are currently in place, and no standard for engineering such structures. What’s more, the designs that are deployed tend to have a low wave dissipation per unit volume of material used. That is, it takes a huge amount of material to break enough wave energy to adequately protect coastal communities.

      The MIT team instead looked for ways to engineer an artificial reef that would efficiently dissipate wave energy with less material, while also providing a refuge for fish living along any vulnerable coast.

      “Remember, natural coral reefs are only found in tropical waters,” says Triantafyllou, who is director of the MIT Sea Grant. “We cannot have these reefs, for instance, in Massachusetts. But architected reefs don’t depend on temperature, so they can be placed in any water, to protect more coastal areas.”

      MIT researchers test the wave-breaking performance of two artificial reef structures in the MIT Towing Tank.Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

      The new effort is the result of a collaboration between researchers in MIT Sea Grant, who developed the reef structure’s hydrodynamic design, and researchers at the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), who worked to make the structure modular and easy to fabricate on location. The team’s architected reef design grew out of two seemingly unrelated problems. CBA researchers were developing ultralight cellular structures for the aerospace industry, while Sea Grant researchers were assessing the performance of blowout preventers in offshore oil structures — cylindrical valves that are used to seal off oil and gas wells and prevent them from leaking.

      The team’s tests showed that the structure’s cylindrical arrangement generated a high amount of drag. In other words, the structure appeared to be especially efficient in dissipating high-force flows of oil and gas. They wondered: Could the same arrangement dissipate another type of flow, in ocean waves?

      The researchers began to play with the general structure in simulations of water flow, tweaking its dimensions and adding certain elements to see whether and how waves changed as they crashed against each simulated design. This iterative process ultimately landed on an optimized geometry: a vertical cylinder flanked by four long slats, each attached to the cylinder in a way that leaves space for water to flow through the resulting structure. They found this setup essentially breaks up any incoming wave energy, causing parts of the wave-induced flow to spiral to the sides rather than crashing ahead.

      “We’re leveraging this turbulence and these powerful jets to ultimately dissipate wave energy,” Ferrandis says.

      Standing up to storms

      Once the researchers identified an optimal wave-dissipating structure, they fabricated a laboratory-scale version of an architected reef made from a series of the cylindrical structures, which they 3D-printed from plastic. Each test cylinder measured about 1 foot wide and 4 feet tall. They assembled a number of cylinders, each spaced about a foot apart, to form a fence-like structure, which they then lowered into a wave tank at MIT. They then generated waves of various heights and measured them before and after passing through the architected reef.

      “We saw the waves reduce substantially, as the reef destroyed their energy,” Triantafyllou says.

      The team has also looked into making the structures more porous, and friendly to fish. They found that, rather than making each structure from a solid slab of plastic, they could use a more affordable and sustainable type of cement.

      “We’ve worked with biologists to test the cement we intend to use, and it’s benign to fish, and ready to go,” he adds.

      They identified an ideal pattern of “voxels,” or microstructures, that cement could be molded into, in order to fabricate the reefs while creating pockets in which fish could live. This voxel geometry resembles individual egg cartons, stacked end to end, and appears to not affect the structure’s overall wave-dissipating power.

      “These voxels still maintain a big drag while allowing fish to move inside,” Ferrandis says.

      The team is currently fabricating cement voxel structures and assembling them into a lab-scale architected reef, which they will test under various wave conditions. They envision that the voxel design could be modular, and scalable to any desired size, and easy to transport and install in various offshore locations. “Now we’re simulating actual sea patterns, and testing how these models will perform when we eventually have to deploy them,” says Anjali Sinha, a graduate student at MIT who recently joined the group.

      Going forward, the team hopes to work with beach towns in Massachusetts to test the structures on a pilot scale.

      “These test structures would not be small,” Triantafyllou emphasizes. “They would be about a mile long, and about 5 meters tall, and would cost something like 6 million dollars per mile. So it’s not cheap. But it could prevent billions of dollars in storm damage. And with climate change, protecting the coasts will become a big issue.”

      This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. More

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      in Environment

      Think globally, rebuild locally

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      Building construction accounts for a huge chunk of greenhouse gas emissions: About 36 percent of carbon dioxide emissions and 40 percent of energy consumption in Europe, for instance. That’s why the European Union has developed regulations about the reuse of building materials.

      Some cities are adding more material reuse into construction already. Amsterdam, for example, is attempting to slash its raw material use by half by 2030. The Netherlands as a whole aims for a “circular economy” of completely reused materials by 2050.

      But the best way to organize the reuse of construction waste is still being determined. For one thing: Where should reusable building materials be stored before they are reused? A newly published study focusing on Amsterdam finds the optimal material reuse system for construction has many local storage “hubs” that keep materials within a few miles of where they will be needed.

      “Our findings provide a starting point for policymakers in Amsterdam to strategize land use effectively,” says Tanya Tsui, a postdoc at MIT and a co-author of the new paper. “By identifying key locations repeatedly favored across various hub scenarios, we underscore the importance of prioritizing these areas for future circular economy endeavors in Amsterdam.”

      The study adds to an emerging research area that connects climate change and urban planning.

      “The issue is where you put material in between demolition and new construction,” says Fábio Duarte, a principal researcher at MIT’s Senseable City Lab and a co-author of the new paper. “It will have huge impacts in terms of transportation. So you have to define the best sites. Should there be only one? Should we hold materials across a wide number of sites? Or is there an optimal number, even if it changes over time? This is what we examined in the paper.”

      The paper, “Spatial optimization of circular timber hubs,” is published in NPJ Nature Urban Sustainability. The authors are Tsui, who is a postdoc at the MIT Senseable Amsterdam Lab in the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS); Titus Venverloo, a research fellow at MIT Senseable Amsterdam Lab and AMS; Tom Benson, a researcher at the Senseable City Lab; and Duarte, who is also a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the MIT Center for Real Estate.

      Numerous experts have previously studied at what scale the “circular economy” of reused materials might best operate. Some have suggested that very local circuits of materials recycling make the most sense; others have proposed that building-materials recycling will work best at a regional scale, with a radius of distribution covering 30 or more miles. Some analyses contend that global-scale reuse will be necessary to an extent.

      The current study adds to this examination of the best geographic scale for using construction materials again. Currently the storage hubs that do exist for such reused materials are chosen by individual companies, but those locations might not be optimal either economically or environmentally. 

      To conduct the study, the researchers essentially conducted a series of simulations of the Amsterdam metropolitan area, focused exclusively on timber reuse. The simulations examined how the system would work if anywhere from one to 135 timber storage hubs existed in greater Amsterdam. The modeling accounted for numerous variables, such as emissions reductions, logistical factors, and even how changing supply-and-demand scenarios would affect the viability of the reusehubs.

      Ultimately, the research found that Amsterdam’s optimal system would have 29 timber hubs, each serving a radius of about 2 miles. That setup generated 95 percent of the maximum reduction in CO2 emissions, while retaining logistical and economic benefits.

      That results also lands firmly on the side of having more localized networks for keeping construction materials in use.

      “If we have demolition happening in certain sites, then we can project where the best spots around the city are to have these circular economy hubs, as we call them,” Duarte says. “It’s not only one big hub — or one hub per construction site.”

      The study seeks to identify not only the optimal number of storage sites, but to identify where those sites might be.

      “[We hope] our research sparks discussions regarding the location and scale of circular hubs,” Tsui says. “While much attention has been given to governance aspects of the circular economy in cities, our study demonstrates the potential of utilizing location data on materials to inform decisions in urban planning.”

      The simulations also illuminated the dynamics of materials reuse. In scenarios where Amsterdam had from two to 20 timber recycling hubs, the costs involved lowered as the number of hubs increased — because having more hubs reduces transportation costs. But when the number of hubs went about 40, the system as a whole became more expensive — because each timber depot was not storing enough material to justify the land use.

      As such, the results may be of interest to climate policymakers, urban planners, and business interests getting involved in implementing the circular economy in the construction industry.

      “Ultimately,” Tsui says, “we envision our research catalyzing meaningful discussions and guiding policymakers toward more informed decisions in advancing the circular economy agenda in urban contexts.”

      The research was supported, in part, by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program. More

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      in Environment

      Understanding the impacts of mining on local environments and communities

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      Hydrosocial displacement refers to the idea that resolving water conflict in one area can shift the conflict to a different area. The concept was coined by Scott Odell, a visiting researcher in MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). As part of ESI’s Program on Mining and the Circular Economy, Odell researches the impacts of extractive industries on local environments and communities, especially in Latin America. He discovered that hydrosocial displacements are often in regions where the mining industry is vying for use of precious water sources that are already stressed due to climate change.

      Odell is working with John Fernández, ESI director and professor in the Department of Architecture, on a project that is examining the converging impacts of climate change, mining, and agriculture in Chile. The work is funded by a seed grant from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Specifically, the project seeks to answer how the expansion of seawater desalination by the mining industry is affecting local populations, and how climate change and mining affect Andean glaciers and the agricultural communities dependent upon them.By working with communities in mining areas, Odell and Fernández are gaining a sense of the burden that mining minerals needed for the clean energy transition is placing on local populations, and the types of conflicts that arise when water sources become polluted or scarce. This work is of particular importance considering over 100 countries pledged a commitment to the clean energy transition at the recent United Nations climate change conference, known as COP28.

      Play video

      J-WAFS Community Spotlight on Scott Odell

      Water, humanity’s lifebloodAt the March 2023 United Nations (U.N.) Water Conference in New York, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned “water is in deep trouble. We are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use and evaporating it through global heating.” A quarter of the world’s population already faces “extremely high water stress,” according to the World Resources Institute. In an effort to raise awareness of major water-related issues and inspire action for innovative solutions, the U.N. created World Water Day, observed every year on March 22. This year’s theme is “Water for Peace,” underscoring the fact that even though water is a basic human right and intrinsic to every aspect of life, it is increasingly fought over as supplies dwindle due to problems including drought, overuse, or mismanagement.  

      The “Water for Peace” theme is exemplified in Fernández and Odell’s J-WAFS project, where findings are intended to inform policies to reduce social and environmental harms inflicted on mining communities and their limited water sources.“Despite broad academic engagement with mining and climate change separately, there has been a lack of analysis of the societal implications of the interactions between mining and climate change,” says Odell. “This project is helping to fill the knowledge gap. Results will be summarized in Spanish and English and distributed to interested and relevant parties in Chile, ensuring that the results can be of benefit to those most impacted by these challenges,” he adds.

      The effects of mining for the clean energy transition

      Global climate change is understood to be the most pressing environmental issue facing humanity today. Mitigating climate change requires reducing carbon emissions by transitioning away from conventional energy derived from burning fossil fuels, to more sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power. Because copper is an excellent conductor of electricity, it will be a crucial element in the clean energy transition, in which more solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles will be manufactured. “We are going to see a major increase in demand for copper due to the clean energy transition,” says Odell.

      In 2021, Chile produced 26 percent of the world’s copper, more than twice as much as any other country, Odell explains. Much of Chile’s mining is concentrated in and around the Atacama Desert — the world’s driest desert. Unfortunately, mining requires large amounts of water for a variety of processes, including controlling dust at the extraction site, cooling machinery, and processing and transporting ore.

      Chile is also one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products. Farmland is typically situated in the valleys downstream of several mines in the high Andes region, meaning mines get first access to water. This can lead to water conflict between mining operations and agricultural communities. Compounding the problem of mining for greener energy materials to combat climate change, are the very effects of climate change. According to the Chilean government, the country has suffered 13 years of the worst drought in history. While this is detrimental to the mining industry, it is also concerning for those working in agriculture, including the Indigenous Atacameño communities that live closest to the Escondida mine, the largest copper mine in the world. “There was never a lot of water to go around, even before the mine,” Odell says. The addition of Escondida stresses an already strained water system, leaving Atacameño farmers and individuals vulnerable to severe water insecurity.

      What’s more, waste from mining, known as tailings, includes minerals and chemicals that can contaminate water in nearby communities if not properly handled and stored. Odell says the secure storage of tailings is a high priority in earthquake-prone Chile. “If an earthquake were to hit and damage a tailings dam, it could mean toxic materials flowing downstream and destroying farms and communities,” he says.

      Chile’s treasured glaciers are another piece of the mining, climate change, and agricultural puzzle. Caroline White-Nockleby, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, is working with Odell and Fernández on the J-WAFS project and leading the research specifically on glaciers. “These may not be the picturesque bright blue glaciers that you might think of, but they are, nonetheless, an important source of water downstream,” says White-Nockleby. She goes on to explain that there are a few different ways that mines can impact glaciers.

      In some cases, mining companies have proposed to move or even destroy glaciers to get at the ore beneath. Other impacts include dust from mining that falls on glaciers. White-Nockleby says, “this makes the glaciers a darker color, so, instead of reflecting the sun’s rays away, [the glacier] may absorb the heat and melt faster.” This shows that even when not directly intervening with glaciers, mining activities can cause glacial decline, adding to the threat glaciers already face due to climate change. She also notes that “glaciers are an important water storage facility,” describing how, on an annual cycle, glaciers freeze and melt, allowing runoff that downstream agricultural communities can utilize. If glaciers suddenly melt too quickly, flooding of downstream communities can occur.

      Desalination offers a possible, but imperfect, solution

      Chile’s extensive coastline makes it uniquely positioned to utilize desalination — the removal of salts from seawater — to address water insecurity. Odell says that “over the last decade or so, there’s been billions of dollars of investments in desalination in Chile.”

      As part of his dissertation work at Clark University, Odell found broad optimism in Chile for solving water issues in the mining industry through desalination. Not only was the mining industry committed to building desalination plants, there was also political support, and support from some community members in highland communities near the mines. Yet, despite the optimism and investment, desalinated water was not replacing the use of continental water. He concluded that “desalination can’t solve water conflict if it doesn’t reduce demand for continental water supplies.”

      However, after publishing those results, Odell learned that new estimates at the national level showed that desalination operations had begun to replace the use of continental water after 2018. In two case studies that he currently focuses on — the Escondida and Los Pelambres copper mines — the mining companies have expanded their desalination objectives in order to reduce extraction from key continental sources. This seems to be due to a variety of factors. For one thing, in 2022, Chile’s water code was reformed to prioritize human water consumption and environmental protection of water during scarcity and in the allocation of future rights. It also shortened the granting of water rights from “in perpetuity” to 30 years. Under this new code, it is possible that the mining industry may have expanded its desalination efforts because it viewed continental water resources as less secure, Odell surmises.

      As part of the J-WAFS project, Odell has found that recent reactions have been mixed when it comes to the rapid increase in the use of desalination. He spent over two months doing fieldwork in Chile by conducting interviews with members of government, industry, and civil society at the Escondida, Los Pelambres, and Andina mining sites, as well as in Chile’s capital city, Santiago. He has spoken to local and national government officials, leaders of fishing unions, representatives of mining and desalination companies, and farmers. He observed that in the communities where the new desalination plants are being built, there have been concerns from community members as to whether they will get access to the desalinated water, or if it will belong solely to the mines.

      Interviews at the Escondida and Los Pelambres sites, in which desalination operations are already in place or under construction, indicate acceptance of the presence of desalination plants combined with apprehension about unknown long-term environmental impacts. At a third mining site, Andina, there have been active protests against a desalination project that would supply water to a neighboring mine, Los Bronces. In that community, there has been a blockade of the desalination operation by the fishing federation. “They were blockading that operation for three months because of concerns over what the desalination plant would do to their fishing grounds,” Odell says. And this is where the idea of hydrosocial displacement comes into the picture, he explains. Even though desalination operations are easing tensions with highland agricultural communities, new issues are arising for the communities on the coast. “We can’t just look to desalination to solve our problems if it’s going to create problems somewhere else” Odell advises.

      Within the process of hydrosocial displacement, interacting geographical, technical, economic, and political factors constrain the range of responses to address the water conflict. For example, communities that have more political and financial power tend to be better equipped to solve water conflict than less powerful communities. In addition, hydrosocial concerns usually follow the flow of water downstream, from the highlands to coastal regions. Odell says that this raises the need to look at water from a broader perspective.

      “We tend to address water concerns one by one and that can, in practice, end up being kind of like whack-a-mole,” says Odell. “When we think of the broader hydrological system, water is very much linked, and we need to look across the watershed. We can’t just be looking at the specific community affected now, but who else is affected downstream, and will be affected in the long term. If we do solve a water issue by moving it somewhere else, like moving a tailings dam somewhere else, or building a desalination plant, resources are needed in the receiving community to respond to that,” suggests Odell.

      The company building the desalination plant and the fishing federation ultimately reached an agreement and the desalination operation will be moving forward. But Odell notes, “the protest highlights concern about the impacts of the operation on local livelihoods and environments within the much larger context of industrial pollution in the area.”

      The power of communities

      The protest by the fishing federation is one example of communities coming together to have their voices heard. Recent proposals by mining companies that would affect glaciers and other water sources used by agriculture communities have led to other protests that resulted in new agreements to protect local water supplies and the withdrawal of some of the mining proposals.Odell observes that communities have also gone to the courts to raise their concerns. The Atacameño communities, for example, have drawn attention to over-extraction of water resources by the Escondida mine. “Community members are also pursuing education in these topics so that there’s not such a power imbalance between mining companies and local communities,” Odell remarks. This demonstrates the power local communities can have to protect continental water resources.The political and social landscape of Chile may also be changing in favor of local communities. Beginning with what is now referred to as the Estallido Social (social outburst) over inequality in 2019, Chile has undergone social upheaval that resulted in voters calling for a new constitution. Gabriel Boric, a progressive candidate, whose top priorities include social and environmental issues, was elected president during this period. These trends have brought major attention to issues of economic inequality, environmental harms of mining, and environmental justice, which is putting pressure on the mining industry to make a case for its operations in the country, and to justify the environmental costs of mining.

      What happens after the mine dries up?

      From his fieldwork interviews, Odell has learned that the development of mines within communities can offer benefits. Mining companies typically invest directly in communities through employment, road construction, and sometimes even by building or investing in schools, stadiums, or health clinics. Indirectly, mines can have spillover effects in the economy since miners might support local restaurants, hotels, or stores. But what happens when the mine closes? As one community member Odell interviewed stated: “When the mine is gone, what are we going to have left besides a big hole in the ground?”

      Odell suggests that a multi-pronged approach should be taken to address the future state of water and mining. First, he says we need to have broader conversations about the nature of our consumption and production at domestic and global scales. “Mining is driven indirectly by our consumption of energy and directly by our consumption of everything from our buildings to devices to cars,” Odell states. “We should be looking for ways to moderate our consumption and consume smarter through both policy and practice so that we don’t solve climate change while creating new environmental harms through mining.”One of the main ways we can do this is by advancing the circular economy by recycling metals already in the system, or even in landfills, to help build our new clean energy infrastructure. Even so, the clean energy transition will still require mining, but according to Odell, that mining can be done better. “Mining companies and government need to do a better job of consulting with communities. We need solid plans and financing for mine closures in place from the beginning of mining operations, so that when the mine dries up, there’s the money needed to secure tailings dams and protect the communities who will be there forever,” Odell concludes.Overall, it will take an engaged society — from the mining industry to government officials to individuals — to think critically about the role we each play in our quest for a more sustainable planet, and what that might mean for the most vulnerable populations among us. More