Planning: E-RISE RII: Hydrogen as a Harness for Waste Energy

About This Grant

The demand for robust, reliable, and flexible energy sources will continue to increase in the United States. In order to satisfy consumer, industry, and technology demands for global competitiveness, the domestic energy grid must bring on many new reliable energy sources. This planning project will invoke fundamental and applied expertise in energy science and engineering to develop a research project that will lead to the implementation of hydrogen as a reliable but sustainable energy carrier that otherwise might be lost due to difficulties in capturing and storing waste energy from traditional sectors like hydrocarbons and wind. By working with potential and existing academic, industry, and state partners in the planning stages, new technologies can be identified that can be integrated into the existing energy landscape. This work will lead to the development of a long-term project that has the potential to create new energy output while simultaneously creating new workforce opportunities. It is anticipated that hydrogen can sustainably mitigate the loss of produced energy both from hydrocarbon and renewable sectors in Oklahoma. The project aims to facilitate new energy and workforce sources statewide. The project will be led by the Oklahoma State University in collaboration with the University of Oklahoma and Southwestern Oklahoma State University. In Oklahoma, existing energy production results in lost or wasted energy through combustion of waste methane from oil and gas exploration, stranded electrons in wind production, and loss of critical elements like lithium and rare earth metals from produced water associated with hydrocarbon production. Hydrogen (H2) can provide a robust, flexible, and widely-deployable route to harvest and capture this waste energy, while simultaneously introducing new technology to potential corporate and state government partners that play key roles in diversifying energy production and distribution in Oklahoma. During the planning project, the team will explore the development of two key emerging energy areas that can, with appropriate research advances, lead to (1) new CO2-free hydrogen supplies via conversion of waste hydrocarbons, and (2) new hydrogen supplies from wastewater using waste electrons from existing wind production, with ancillary recovery of critical and rare-earth elements for battery and electronics production. This project is supported by the EPSCoR Research Infrastructure Improvement Program: EPSCoR Research Incubators for STEM Excellence (E-RISE), which supports the development of sustainable research infrastructure and capacity in EPSCoR jurisdictions through collaborative, hypothesis-driven, or problem-driven research and workforce development to improve competitiveness in selected STEM fields. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.