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.