Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to generate comprehensive measures of environmental impacts from producing a fuel, a product or a service. Our group builds LCA models of energy technologies.
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Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to generate comprehensive measures of environmental impacts from producing a fuel, a product or a service. Our group builds LCA models of energy technologies.
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Optimization is used to choose technology configurations, designs, and operating conditions to achieve goals such as reduced cost and environmental impacts. Our group has applied optimization to carbon dioxide capture technologies and transportation fuels.
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The depletion of conventional energy resources has led to the development of fossil-based substitutes for oil such as oil shale, tar sands, and coal- and natural gas-based synthetic fuels. We examine the nature of resource depletion and the dynamics of these transitions.
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This Environmental Assessment and Optimization (EAO) Group focuses on building tools to reduce the environmental impacts of energy systems. The current group focus is on understanding greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from fossil energy systems. Our approach includes building engineering-based bottom-up life cycle assessment (LCA) models to generate rigorous estimates of environmental impacts from energy extraction and conversion technologies. Also, we build optimization tools to improve the environmental and economic performance of energy systems.
Our methods are applied primarily to transportation fuels, in an effort to understand and reduce the environmental impacts of conventional petroleum and substitutes for conventional petroleum (e.g., oil sands, oil shale). We are also currently developing optimization capabilities for carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies. A third area of interest is in the mathematical modeling of petroleum resource depletion and the shifts to alternative energy resources.
Congratulations to recent M.S. graduates Chandler Kemp, Yuchi Sun, and Sharad Bharadwaj, as well as recent Ph.D. graduate Charles Kang!
Charles Kang of the EAO group successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis entitled "Computational optimization of design and variable operation of a CO2-capture-enabled coal-natural-gas power station". At our graduation celebration, he then successfully consumed a full rack of "victory ribs" (with help from his fellow grad students and his advisor). Congratulations Dr. Kang!
Phil Brodrick has published new research on integrating solar thermal with carbon capture and storage to capture CO2 emissions.
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