Back
Climate
LLNL supports CO2 storage in California’s delta
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) has awarded $6 million to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers, as part of a $45.2 million award to a team led by Pelican Renewables LLC, to develop a regional CO2 storage hub in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California. The funding came through FECM’s…
Big Ideas Podcast tackles the road to carbon removal
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has released a new episode of the Big Ideas Lab Podcast, focusing on the critical efforts being made to help remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The episode provides insights into how 68 researchers nationwide came up with a comprehensive analysis of the capacity and costs for carbon dioxide removal at a county level…
Ramping up the scale of climate and energy technology
One of the biggest challenges implementing energy and climate technologies is actually scaling it up to deploy it. While scale-up has largely been the domain of industrial R&D teams, advances in modelling and experimental techniques increasingly allow early-stage researchers like those at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to contribute to the process. In a…
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s El Capitan verified as world's fastest supercomputer
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), in collaboration with the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and AMD, have officially unveiled El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer and first exascale system dedicated to national security. Verified at 1.742 exaFLOPs (1.742 quintillion calculations per second) on…
Kim Budil, LLNL named in inaugural Top 100 climate list
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Director Kim Budil and the team that achieved fusion in 2022 have been named to The Independent’s inaugural Climate 100 list, which highlights climate activists, innovators, scientists, business leaders, creators, policymakers and entrepreneurs involved in the fight against climate change. Budil and the Lab are recognized for…
Getting into the details of carbon accounting
Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is essential for climate change mitigation, but no single standardized methodology exists for evaluating project-level net carbon removal from the atmosphere. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators from Lawrence Berkeley and National Renewable Energy national laboratories and UC Berkeley, have looked into the…
All ears on the Big Ideas Lab podcast
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has big ideas and is showing the world in the Big Ideas Lab weekly podcast that takes listeners behind the fences and into its heart. “This is where big ideas come to life,” said Lab Director Kim Budil. “To do this, we bring together dynamic teams of many different disciplines — laser physicists and materials scientists and…
Tropical forests feel the burn of climate change
Tropical forests account for more than 50% of the global terrestrial carbon sink, but climate change threatens to alter the carbon balance of these ecosystems. New research by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and colleagues from Colorado State University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute found that warming and drying of tropical forest…
Greenland ice sheet melted in recent past
Greenland was once actually green — even if it was close to a million years ago. But its lack of an ice sheet back then may lead to clues about the increased risk of sea-level rise in a warmer future. A new study provides the first direct evidence that the center, not just the edges, of Greenland’s ice sheet melted away in the recent geological past and the now-ice-covered…
Chemical and transportation industries could get a boost with new catalyst coating
Coupling electrochemical conversion of the greenhouse gas CO2 with renewable electricity sources — such as solar and wind — promises green production of high-demand chemicals and transportation fuels. Carbon dioxide coupling products such as ethylene, ethanol and acetic acid are particularly useful as feedstocks for the chemical industry and powering vehicles. While…
It’s all in the accounting
Natural ecosystems can be used to offset manmade CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that we add to the atmosphere, but the accounting needs to be right for carbon offset policies to be effective. For years, it’s been suspected that forest inventory and, more recently, biometeorological methods bias the carbon sequestration equation by potentially miscounting the…
Three selected as Graduate Student Research program recipients
Three graduate students have earned Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program awards to perform their doctoral dissertation research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The prestigious award helps cover living expenses and travel for 60 students from universities across the nation. Their proposed research projects…
A pattern of temperature change emerges from natural climate fluctuations
When comparing model simulations of Earth’s recent warming to real-world observations, differences can arise from several factors, including model errors in the simulated response to increased greenhouse gases and natural fluctuations within the climate system. Natural climate variability, also called internal variability, can change regional and global atmospheric…
Unexpected source of nutrients fuels growth of toxic algae from Lake Erie
Climate change, such as warming and changes in precipitation patterns, affects the frequency and severity of harmful algal blooms (HABs) globally, including those of toxin-producing cyanobacteria that can contaminate drinking water. These nutrient-induced blooms cause worldwide public and ecosystem health concerns. Since the mid-1990s, Lake Erie, the shallowest and warmest…
Lab study on climate sensitivity earns top notch in list of influential research
The American Geophysical Union is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its journal Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) by showcasing some of the highest-achieving papers that have been published over the past 50 years. A paper by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists is one of the winners. The paper, “Causes of Higher Climate Sensitivity in CMIP6 Models,”…
Pett-Ridge selected as a 2024 Ecological Society of America fellow
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist and head of the Lab’s Carbon Initiative Jennifer Pett-Ridge has been selected as a fellow of the Ecological Society of America (ESA). ESA designates fellows of the society for certain members who have made outstanding contributions to a wide range of fields served by ESA. Pett-Ridge was selected for her work in soil…
Understanding soil carbon's sensitivity to increasing global temperatures
Particulate soil carbon may be more vulnerable to microbial decomposition under warmer temperatures associated with climate change. Soil organic matter contains more carbon than plants and the atmosphere combined. Soil is increasingly considered for its potential role in climate mitigation due to its ability to sequester more carbon, but it also is critical to understand…
Underneath it all: building a better understanding of carbon use by soil microbes
Microbes are major drivers of carbon and nutrient fluxes in Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems; however, Earth system models used for climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies typically exclude explicit representation of soil microorganisms. A team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) and…
Using agricultural residues for fuel and chemicals
A Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientist is part of a research team shedding new light on how to access the sugars locked up in plant materials in order to convert byproducts into new feedstocks for production of fuels, materials and chemicals. Converting grasses, weeds, wood and other plant residues into sustainable products normally produced using…
Hydrogen storage demonstrated for semi trucks
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Verne, a San Francisco-based startup, have demonstrated a cryo-compressed hydrogen storage system of suitable scale for heavy-duty vehicles. This is the first time cryo-compressed hydrogen storage has been demonstrated at a scale large enough to be useful for semi trucks, a milestone in high-density hydrogen storage…
