Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 12:41pm PDT | Modified: July 14, 2010, 2:03 PM

PNNL, China team up on clean energy

by Christina Williams
Sustainable Business Oregon

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Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is part of a joint U.S.-Chinese team embarking on projects in three separate research areas to accelerate the development and deployment of coal conversion, emissions capture and carbon storage technologies.

PNNL, which is based in Richland, Wash., and the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown, W.Va., sent laboratory directors to meet with researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing to kick off the new clean energy technology research effort in June.

The projects are the first activities to come out of a 2009 memorandum of understanding among the three organizations.

"Establishing a strong scientific alignment between U.S. and Chinese researchers is the key to developing and deploying solutions to our collective emissions problem," said PNNL Director Mike Kluse in a statement. "We must use our nations' complementary skills, in collaboration, to move discoveries and technologies into the marketplace."

The research team, called the Clean Energy Partnership, will perform research projects in three areas:

• • Evaluate the challenges and costs of deploying emissions-capture and storage technologies in China in depleted oil fields and deep geological formations.
• • Collaborate on co-gasification of coal and biomass as well as the development of new, high-temperature materials and processes to remove impurities in the emissions stream.
• • Improve the overall efficiency and economics of converting synthetic gas into natural gas.

PNNL's collaborations with China date back to the early 1990s when it helped found the Beijing Energy Efficiency Center.

"The United States and China are the world's two largest economies and face similar challenges with growing energy consumption and its impacts," said Kluse. "We owe it to ourselves and the world to develop and then deploy technology that will significantly reduce industrial emissions."

More information about the collaboration is available in this PDF report.

PNNL is a U.S. Department of Energy lab managed by Ohio-based Battelle. It employs 4,700 people and has an annual budget of $1.1 billion.