Texas Tech professor receives DOE grant to advance clean energy

(Press-News.org) Texas Tech University’s Qingwang Yuan, an assistant professor in the Bob L. Herd Department of Petroleum Engineering, has received a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM).

Yuan and Texas Tech will take the lead on a project titled, “Incubating Next Generation Clean Energy Scientists and Engineers Through Minority-Scholar Exchange and In-Situ Hydrogen Production Research.”

The research will be funded as part of an investment of more than $17 million from the DOE into 19 early-stage research endeavors. Projects were selected under FECM’s University Training and Research program and are geared toward advancing decarbonization and net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.  

“FECM is excited to partner with our universities in communities located throughout the country to develop a skilled and diverse workforce of professionals helping to achieve our goal of a clean energy and industrial economy,” said Assistant Secretary of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Brad Crabtree.

Working in collaboration with Texas A&M, Howard University and the University at Buffalo, the project brings together three minority-serving institutions (MSI) and one non-MSI with complementary expertise and research capabilities to form a new partnership and advance the study of clean energy solutions.

The collaborating institutions will make use of visiting scholars and shared expertise to better prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers, promote research capabilities of participating universities and fill critical workforce gaps in clean energy.

Specifically, technology invented by Yuan will be coupled with the expertise of his co-PIs in hopes of enabling true carbon-zero hydrogen production from shale gas reservoirs.

Texas Tech, Texas A&M and Howard will each send two visiting scholars to each of the other participating universities for a month each year over a three-year period, while the University at Buffalo will host visiting scholars to give students at the university a broad base of training and expertise in an emerging field.

“Subsurface hydrogen production has the significant potential to provide affordable, clean hydrogen to meet the increasing clean energy need,” Yuan said. “Students in petroleum have the unique advantage to repurpose their skillsets in the subsurface to enable this emerging, clean and transformative technology in the near future.”

Yuan’s research group, the HOPE Group, is primarily focused on carbon-zero, carbon-free, and carbon-negative hydrogen production from the earth’s subsurface.

More information about this project and others funded through the DOE can be found here.

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