As staples of modern life, plastics count few peers in sheer use. Manufacturers have produced more than 8.3 billion metric tons since the early 1950s. And if consumption patterns hold, annual plastics consumption is likely to jump from 516 million metric tons globally in 2025 to more than 1.2 billion metric tons in 2060, according to the World Health Organization.

Against this backdrop, work by faculty affiliates in the EMS Energy Institute promises to ease the impact of international appetites for plastics. Waste from the petroleum-based materials tends to enter landfills, while their production draws on an extensive supply chain with effects across communities.

Jennifer Baka

Jennifer Baka, associate professor in the Penn State Department of Geography, is evaluating the supply chain through a project centered on Shell Polymers Monaca, a $14 billion petrochemical complex in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. At the same time, Randy Vander Wal, professor in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, is innovating the conversion of waste plastics into synthetic graphites—a form of carbon that’s important for energy storage.

Randy Vander Wal

In her work, Baka looks at the social and environmental effects of industry through a historical lens. With the United States attempting to reindustrialize, the country needs methods and processes to limit the tolls seen in earlier extractive practices, she says. Her own family—she is a granddaughter of coal miners in northeastern Pennsylvania—faced the environmental and health risks associated with mining.

“We need to be cognizant of past consequences so that we don’t repeat the past, as in the examples of the coal and steel industries,” says Baka, an energy geographer. “We can change these historic patterns for people who live in close proximity to industry and have borne the consequences. We can chart a new course.”

To help establish that path, Baka has undertaken a five-year project—now in its fourth year—funded by a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Program Award. The effort examines how the Shell complex affects residents' relationships with the environment and with environmental policy.

The facility, known as a cracker plant, transforms ethane—a chemical byproduct of shale gas development—into components used to make plastics. Current regulatory structures treat the plant, and each pipeline feeding it, as a separate component.

Baka’s approach evaluates the plant, the pipelines, and other supply components as a single, unified system. Her goal is a more thorough understanding of environmental impacts and influences on policymaking. That knowledge can provide regulators and industry operators with more comprehensive insight to shape decisions, prevent environmental burdens, and ease effects, she says.

“We’ve been interviewing community members in Beaver County to identify tools and resources that would be helpful to them,” Baka says, noting a digital mapping tool that makes her research data publicly accessible. “Communities both welcome the economic benefits of energy and have questions about—for instance—water usage, the availability of water in their area, and the quality of that water amid industrial development.”

Assembling such insights for public and policymaking use, Baka says, is a key part of an emerging field known as political-industrial ecology (PIE). Researchers in the field explore justice- and equity-guided methods for “altering, reducing, and transforming industrial society,” as she puts it on the PIE Initiative website.

She recently launched the initiative, among the newest programs organized under the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State. In 2025, Baka published a paper on her Beaver County work in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Meanwhile, Vander Wal’s research presents new possibilities for discarded packaging and food-service plastics—products that typically see just one use, or single-use plastics. At roughly 150 million tons a year, single-use plastics represent about half the total plastic produced globally, as Vander Wal and his colleagues noted in a 2024 paper in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Americans alone annually use about 100 pounds of packaging and food-service plastics per person—including those in bags, films, yogurt containers, and bottle caps. Since most of that is never recycled, the waste stream represents a near-inexhaustible source of potential raw material for widely needed graphite, Vander Wal says.

“Even when they are set aside for recycling, these plastics face an uphill battle in the recycling world. They’re very hard to recycle,” explains Vander Wal, who is also a professor of materials science and engineering and mechanical engineering. “They have to be collected and separated, and then resellers—when they can resell the material—try to get just pennies on every dollar of the material’s original value.”

The method under development by Vander Wal and his group would create much greater value for thrown-out single-use plastics—and incentives for their reuse—through what they describe as “upcycling.” Introducing a small amount of graphene or graphene oxide as a templating agent in pyrolysis—or thermal decomposition—helps the plastics turn into high-quality synthetic graphite that can reduce dependence on mined graphite.

Graphite is instrumental in energy storage not only in the grid system but also in batteries and electric vehicles, among other growing uses. Now performed at the laboratory scale, the upcycling research can, with additional support, enter a scaling-up phase that would follow the Energy Institute’s long history of intermediate prototyping and pilot-scale studies, Vander Wal says.

“This knowledge creation is motivated by sustainability,” he adds, “and by the enormous need for carbon in high-quality and other forms.”

Even as solar power takes off—accounting for most new capacity added to U.S. electric grids in 2024—Nutifafa Doumon sees still more potential.

Most solar energy conversion depends on silicon solar panels, a mid-1950s technology. Silicon—an inorganic semiconductor, made without carbon—isn’t toxic, but manufacturing silicon solar panels comes at an environmental cost. The production of silicon solar panels is an energy-intensive process, requires the use of many chemicals, and faces recycling challenges later on. Other solar panels made from gallium arsenide and cadmium telluride include hazardous materials.

Doumon, assistant professor in the Penn State Department of Materials Science and Engineering and a faculty affiliate of EMS Energy Institute, is researching another solution: organic photovoltaics, or organic solar cells. They can be made from inks with safe solvents, earth-friendlier additives, and carbon-based materials, such as semiconducting polymers. These newer technologies promise lightweight, mechanical flexibility and sustainable innovations in solar energy conversion.

The challenge for researchers, Doumon says, is to make organic solar cells a bit more competitive by improving their longevity and effectiveness in capturing the Sun’s energy. Silicon cells can last as many as twenty years, but current organic solar cells often only last months or a few years, due to quicker degradation.

“We want to understand why organic photovoltaics perform less well in terms of lifetime,” Doumon explains. “We want to improve stability and reliability. This is largely a materials question: What are the materials that unlock that potential, where do we find them, and how do we improve or learn from them?”

The matter is a focus of Doumon’s lab: Sustainable Energy, Materials, and Device Engineering , or SEMDE. Based at University Park, the group of about a dozen researchers—including graduate and undergraduate students—is pursuing the development of both organic and hybrid semiconductor materials to strengthen sources of renewable energy.

Doumon Lab researchers do this, in part, by adding to fundamental scientific knowledge about the materials themselves; how they work; and how they might be applied at large scale, beyond the laboratory level. The group takes a holistic approach, exploring implications of individual raw materials, their sourcing, and their environmental and economic viability as part of the energy transition.

Understanding the work begins with the basics of solar energy. Used largely outdoors, solar cells comprise layers of different materials—and electrodes—that help absorb energy and transfer it as electricity. Much of the Doumon Lab’s emphasis involves a new generation of materials that Doumon describes as similar to perovskites, a high-efficiency and flexible semiconductor alternative to silicon.

Challenges include manufacturing these materials at scale and improving their durability. Doumon also sees promise in harnessing ambient light indoors: A small-scale form of energy recycling that captures light from interior fixtures and turns it back into electricity used on the spot.

“The idea is that we could power a lot of smaller gadgets, like our watches, health-monitoring devices, and other internet-connected electronics, through advanced, small solar cells in our home and work environments,” Doumon explains.

Organics and perovskite-like materials in particular hold potential for those applications—an area under co-exploration by faculty member Ivy Asuo, assistant professor of materials science and engineering.

In other areas, the group is investigating what Doumon describes as semi-transparent applications of solar cells integrated into agriculture—known as agrivoltaics—and into building features like windows and window shades.

“If you can make solar cells with different colors appealing to the eye, and with the right materials, you can incorporate energy conversion on site,” he says. “Our end goal is always to see new technologies deployed in society.”

A recent paper led by Doumon and Souk Yoon (John) Kim, a doctoral candidate and Doumon Lab member, earned publication in the prestigious “2025 Rising Stars in Materials Science” issue of the journal ACS Materials Au. The paper’s focus, the additive 9,10-phenanthrenequinone (PQ), offers environmentally friendly possibilities for stabilizing and improving the efficiency of organic solar cells at low cost, Kim says.

“Stability remains the barrier to real-world deployment of organic solar cells,” he says. “Even moderate stability improvements greatly reduce replacement frequency, waste, and operational cost.”

Nelson Dzade, another faculty affiliate of the Energy Institute, leads the Materials and Minerals Theory Group (MMT). His group develops and applies advanced theoretical methods and machine-learning approaches to predict structure-property-performance relationships of solid-state materials, harnessing those discoveries to improve solar cells, high-capacity batteries, critical-minerals processes, and more.

“Advanced materials share a common characteristic: They are complex, Dzade says. “Achieving the required performance gains demands exploiting the many degrees of freedom of materials development, including multiple chemical components, nanoscale architectures, and tailored electronic structures.”

MMT’s approaches in predictive multiscale modeling and simulations can temper costs and development times, Dzade says, “transforming our ability to design new materials and chemical processes.”

With a recent Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy, Dzade’s group is developing and implementing a multiscale modeling environment that integrates advanced computational approaches with experiments. The goal is a comprehensive, microscopic picture of interfacial phenomena happening within solar cell materials and devices. 

In research published in the journal Nature Energy, Dzade’s group collaborated with international team of scientists to develop a more durable type of perovskite solar cells. They achieve a high efficiency of 21.59 percent conversion of sunlight to electricity—a breakthrough in the field.

In other research published in the journal Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics’ 2025 “Emerging Investigators” collection, Dzade and doctoral student Henry Eya worked with the semiconductor chalcogenide perovskite to optimize photovoltaic applications.

The material “represents a novel class of emerging semiconductors with an Earth-abundant and nontoxic composition and excellent stability for photovoltaics,” Eya says. 

A co-director of the Penn State Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering, and Design with Africa, Dzade is an assistant professor and chair of the Undergraduate Energy Engineering Program in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering. In 2025, he participated in the African School on Electronic Structure Methods and Applications, held at the University of Ghana.

“Materials science and mineral resources development are critical for Africa’s development,” Dzade says. “Research capacity-building in computational materials and minerals science holds significant promise for economic growth, technological innovation, and environmental sustainability.”

Nutifafa Doumon, assistant professor in the Penn State Department of Materials Science and Engineering, in the lab with doctoral candidate Souk Yoon (John) Kim, a member of the Doumon Lab.
Credit: Cyril Kumachang

Sanjay Srinivasan

An analysis from the International Energy Agency (IEA) last November was clear.

Global demand for electricity will surge faster than overall energy growth in the decades ahead, “underscoring the need for diversified energy sources,” as the Associated Press reported on IEA findings.

The news-making forecast speaks to a central idea at the EMS Energy Institute: Powering the future demands an all-hands approach–that is, investment, collaboration, and innovation across a spectrum.

“Our strength is in how we bring together and empower the experts–and future experts–who will help determine how communities meet their energy needs,” says Sanjay Srinivasan, the institute director since June 2023. “Our distinction is our breadth we’re in nearly every segment of energy research, which means we can drive comprehensive strategies.”

Operating in the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS), the Energy Institute is reinforcing its place as a collaborative, cross-disciplinary hub that reaches across the University. A cross-section of initiatives featured in this issue of Energy Innovation captures that scope, from critical minerals and silicon carbide to carbon dioxide storage and political-industrial ecology, an emerging field.

All this work—and much more—will see reinforcement under the institute’s new strategic plan, designed to guide the research community through 2030. In development for several years, the core document is nearing completion after extensive internal and external review and consultation. It includes mechanisms for flexibility, with annual assessments to evaluate the institute’s progress and inform adjustments along the way.

In line with input from faculty, alumni, and supporters, the plan prioritizes close collaborations with industry partners to identify real-world energy challenges and constraints. Answering those challenges means introducing students–then next-generation workforce–into research partnerships that bridge the academy, industry, and other research organizations. And it centers both fundamental and applied research, supporting diverse forms of energy, materials development for energy use, and advanced energy systems.

Also central to the strategic plan is helping to reduce the energy sector’s environmental footprint through effective carbon management. Socioeconomic and environmental aspects of energy transformation represent one of four thematic areas under the plan. The others incorporate materials and minerals, science and engineering, and computational science and artificial intelligence.

“Formalizing these pillars promotes more collaboration within each area and helps us structure conversations across the institute,” Srinivasan says. “Improved organization and communication encourage major breakthroughs in our own research community and across the University system.

“We can better build on our overlap with several other Penn State institutes, including those doing related work in the environment, materials, data sciences, and integrated energy systems,” he adds.

Relationships are a historic cornerstone for the institute, whose origins date to the late 1940s. Its earliest forerunner, the Combustion Laboratory in EMS, launched with backing from coal industry groups and cooperation from the Pennsylvania Department of Mines.

Today, the institute’s embedded ties set a foundation for practical innovations that transition from the research lab to pilot-scale testing and broader application. Big-picture goals for the institute include large-scale research proposals to advance regional initiatives, more research events highlighting key opportunities and disciplinary strengths, and wider partnerships across public and private entities.

Strategic planning also underscores the need for high-quality research facilities—with an emphasis on safety—across the institute. Under the plan, the institute will continue prioritizing updated lab spaces and make technical support available to researchers, helping them seed research.

“We’ve made tremendous progress already in advancing our facilities, thanks in large part to millions of dollars in generous support from external partners,” Srinivasan says. “These spaces are accelerating advancements, giving our researchers the tools to test their ideas, create knowledge, and generate new paths.

“We’re building solutions in every way we can.”

Researchers with the Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance—which is supported by the EMS Energy Institute—show off a completed silicon carbide (SiC) boule, left, and a “crown” formed on the source silicon carbide. The alliance is the only SiC crystal manufacturing center in the U.S. SiC is a critical semiconductor in a variety of technology, including electric vehicles.
Credit: David Kubarek

Energy geographer Jennifer Baka has focused on Shell Polymers Monaca, a petrochemical plant along the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, as part of her research in political-industrial ecology.
Credit: Jennifer Baka

Mostly invisible in daily life, regional transmission organizations (RTOs) form the logistical backbone of electricity delivery. These public-benefit corporations manage bulk-power transmission systems that handle some two-thirds of national electricity demand—a quiet pillar of keeping the lights on for about half the U.S. states.

Industrial energy infrastructure also operates as a relative unknown to many people—vast networks of production, pumps, and pipes running in the background.

To strengthen understanding of these apparatus, two faculty affiliates of the EMS Energy Institute are leading detailed studies of their operations. While the efforts are separate, researchers Seth Blumsack and Jennifer Baka both prioritize knowledge and outcomes of energy systems in the public’s midst.

“The decision-making at RTOs has a direct impact on how the power grid works, its reliability, how much it costs, how green it is,” says Blumsack, professor in the Penn State Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering and co-director of the Center for Energy Law and Policy.

“By understanding how these organizations make decisions—and how different sets of market actors, regulators, and stakeholders influence those decisions—we can improve public awareness of the grid’s governance,” he says.

That wider insight, in time, could bolster the overall power distribution system through governance reforms, Blumsack says. He has explored electricity transmission governance for about a decade, working with peers across universities to understand the impact of federal regulations and other influences as the power market evolves.

Blumsack’s interests include the variable performance of RTOs in moving electricity across the multi-state areas they serve. The nonprofit entities’ duties include operating wholesale markets and transmission systems while developing “innovative procedures to manage transmission equitably,” as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission explains them. Pennsylvania is part of the territory under the PJM Interconnection RTO, which dates to 1927.

Among his current research, Blumsack is helping lead a multi-institution study sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) that targets the political dynamics of RTO decision-making. The work blends qualitative methods involving organizational behavior, methods from political economy, and social-network analysis, exploring the relative difficulty of different decision types as technology and regulations change.

At a 2024 summit of the Electric Power Supply Association, electricity system leaders cautioned that conventional markets aren’t ample to manage the emerging volume of changes in supply and demand. Beyond the growth in low-carbon and renewable resources, power grids are seeing more consumption by new data centers, many supporting artificial intelligence; extreme events and natural hazards linked to climate change; and shifting legislative and political strategies around infrastructure resilience and decarbonization.

Uncertainty about the future scope of data centers is particularly fraught. Too much capacity in electricity infrastructure could lead to an expensive glut of supply, but too little could lead to reliability problems.

Against that backdrop, decisions made by RTOs are especially consequential, demanding up-to-date and comprehensive input, Blumsack says.

“Every time you think you understand the world, the world changes. It presents this thorny risk-management problem that is front and center for transmission governance,” he warns.

Blumsack’s research also focuses on risk analysis for power grids, with an emphasis on natural hazards such as wildfires, hurricanes, and ice storms. He collaborates often with Mort Webster, a professor of energy engineering in the Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering and an EMS Energy Institute faculty affiliate. Webster’s work includes developing algorithms that aid power-transmission planning amid uncertainty—work supported by the NSF.

Among others examining power infrastructure, Chiara Lo Prete, an institute faculty associate and associate professor of energy economics, contributed to a recent study of 11 electricity market design proposals under consideration by grid operators. Lo Prete says high-profile power failures illustrate challenges from a lack of available capacity to provide sufficient energy in times of need.

Elsewhere, Baka, an energy geographer, is leveraging her research to help build an emerging area of study: political-industrial ecology (PIE).

Researchers in the field investigate justice- and equity-guided methods for “altering, reducing, and transforming industrial society,” Baka explains on the website of her recently launched Political-Industrial Ecology Initiative at Penn State. She says medical ailments, social impacts, and environmental effects should be part of holistic assessments of industrial systems.

“When you embed that analysis into cost-benefit analyses, regulation, and collective decision-making, you get a better sense of total costs and benefits and their distribution across society,” Baka says. “And then you really think about how to change that distribution so it’s more equitable.”

Under the PIE approach, policymakers and planners evaluate energy infrastructure—such as new production plants—not as standalone entities but as parts of broader systems that include raw-materials extraction and distribution. Fuller accounting promotes truer analyses as energy markets expand production options, says Baka, an associate professor in the Department of Geography.

“I’m talking with communities to understand their needs—what’s happening to them and what we can do to improve their livelihoods,” she adds. “I see that as part of Penn State’s mandate as a land-grant institution. I want my outputs and my research to be co-produced with community groups.”

Plant Bowen in Bartow County, Georgia, owned by Georgia Power Company, is among the largest coal-fired power plants in the United States. Captured at power plants at other industrial facilities, carbon dioxide can be injected into naturally sealed underground geologic formations.
Credit: Alan M. Cressler, U.S. Geological Survey

Positioned to foster industrial decarbonization at scale, a new center funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation is developing practical strategies for underground carbon dioxide storage.

The Center for CO₂ Storage Modeling, Analytics, and Risk Reduction Technologies (CO₂-SMART) marks a partnership between the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences (EMS) and the Viterbi School of Engineering at University of Southern California. First announced in 2024, the interdisciplinary effort now includes Penn State research contributors in EMS, the College of Engineering, and Penn State Dickinson Law. 

Their objective is a cooperative research program among university partners guided by experts from government, industry, national laboratories, and foundations.

“Carbon research has always been in our research footprint at Penn State,” says Sanjay Srinivasan, director of the Penn State EMS Energy Institute and the John and Willie Leone Family Chair in Energy and Mineral Engineering. “Our rich research legacy in the transformation of carbon, our expansive capacity in geosciences and subsurface engineering, and our expertise working on industry-relevant problems make Penn State a natural fit to collaborate with USC.”

Led at USC by Behnam Jafarpour, professor of chemical engineering and material science, and at Penn State by Srinivasan, CO₂-SMART targets capturing industrial CO₂ emissions before they reach the atmosphere. Sequestering significant quantities in geologic formations would diminish a major contributor to climate change, researchers say.

Captured at power plants and other industrial facilities, the gas can be injected into naturally sealed underground geologic formations like deep saline aquifers. These formations are typically more than a kilometer beneath the surface—naturally safeguarding the storage of the gas.

But implementing the concept at commercial scale is layered. It requires addressing a variety of scientific and financial challenges, such as CO₂’s complex interactions with underground rock and the economics of field work and operations. Further, commercial interests need to follow regulatory frameworks and make sure workers are trained for the job.

CO₂-SMART is developing the approach’s viability with close relationships among principal stakeholders—including CO₂ emitters, injection-site operators, service companies, and regulators—as well as research scientists. The long-term mission is to advance science and technology for storage that’s both safe and cost-effective.

Penn State’s experience in applying scientific discovery for practical uses helped secure its role in the center, Srinivasan says. So did its record in seismic exploration and modeling, applied policy, and resource economics.

“We are redeploying subsurface expertise for new purposes in a new era,” Srinivasan says. “As fossil fuels continue to play a vital part amid the transition to more varied energy sources, many scientists agree carbon sequestration is a must to support the shift.

“The carbon has to be disposed—and Penn State is among the institutions most qualified to develop those pathways,” he adds. “It’s a natural extension of work we’ve been doing for decades.”

Innovations necessary for carbon sequestration include mechanisms to characterize injection sites accurately, monitor displacement of injected CO₂, and manage reservoir pressure, the researchers note.

CO₂-SMART lined up industry collaborators during its first year and is seeking more, says Anne Menefee, assistant professor in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering (EME) at Penn State and a contributor to the project. As an engineer, she explains the effort merges fundamental science with the nuances of policy and law.

“If you ignore technical constraints, then you’re designing policy that won’t be successful or sustainable in the long run,” says Menefee, who is also a faculty affiliate with the EMS Energy Institute. She is part of work to reduce risks and evaluate impacts of carbon-sequestration technologies.

Another need is a clearer legal landscape around liability and regulation, Menefee says. CO₂-SMART collaborators including Seth Blumsack, professor in EME, and Hannah Wiseman, professor of law with dual appointments in EMS and Penn State Dickinson Law, bring backgrounds in legal precedent and boundaries of government authority. They co-direct the Center for Energy Law and Policy at the University.

Blumsack also helps represent Penn State in SPARK 2050, a series of Pennsylvania summits that convene multi-stakeholder discussions on the commonwealth’s policies and direction in energy.

“It’s very important that we be present and have a leadership role in these types of initiatives,” Blumsack says of Penn State. “We’re a land-grant institution. We’re a pan-Pennsylvania institution. In a space where decision-makers are bombarded with messages from specific interests, we can be a neutral convener, provide a broad perspective, and demonstrate thought leadership.”

Tieyuan Zhu, associate professor in the Penn State Department of Geosciences, is another CO₂-SMART contributor. As a geophysicist, he provides technical expertise in imaging near-surface geological structures and sequestered CO₂.

Zhu has been researching CO₂ storage for more than a decade, he says. His focus: making sure storage is safe for the long term and with minimal leakage. His emphasis includes efficient monitoring that isn’t cost-prohibitive for industry.

“Through CO₂-SMART, we can establish open dialogue with industry partners to support immersive research that creates practical solutions and expands collaboration,” Zhu says.

Activities focused on reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere take varied forms across the Energy Institute. Tushar Mittal, an institute affiliate and assistant professor in the Department of Geosciences, is studying carbon sequestration through the use of basalt. The volcanic rock, when crushed into dust, can absorb CO₂ from the atmosphere, while its natural formations in the ground can be a host for injected CO₂.

“Basalt in particular has minerals that can react faster with carbon and sequester more carbon per ton than some other rock types,” Mittal says. “Plus, basalt is fairly prevalent globally and does not have harmful effects when spread on farmland in simultaneous agricultural applications. It hits a bull’s eye.”

Mittal has collaborated with a company—Mati Carbon—to study basalt applications in the Global South and explores how to identify and characterize different types of basalt for specific uses, including under varied geological and climate conditions. In 2025, Mati Carbon won a $50 million grand prize from the XPRIZE Foundation for its work in carbon removal.

“I delve into both fundamental science and models for practical applications that are economically viable,” Mittal explains. “Lots of places might have basalt and farm fields, but not every place is going to see the same level of benefit; it depends on underlying geology, precipitation, climate, and other factors.”

A cross-sector sensibility is core to CO₂-SMART. By late 2025, the effort counted participating organizations that span the energy and utility sectors and governmental agencies, and had several projects planned. Organizers were arranging a CO₂-SMART workshop for summer 2026 at Penn State.

“From a Penn State and an Energy Institute perspective, it makes perfect sense for us to do this work,” Srinivasan says. “The institute routinely represents expertise from across the college. Carbon sequestration calls on us for an all-hands push.”

Single-use plastics such as detergent and water bottles litter the beach at Kanapou Bay, on Kaho’olawe in Hawaii. The location is a hot spot for debris accumulation. An estimated 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic debris are in the world’s oceans.
Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Marine Debris Program

As technology helps enable transitions in the energy industry, the broad area of fossil fuels is rife with potential.

In the EMS Energy Institute, research is targeting legacy products and infrastructure with new innovations. Separate projects led by professors Randy Vander Wal and Arash Dahi Taleghani signal the scope of the institute’s thorough approach to resource development.

In day-to-day consumer packaging, Randy Vander Wal sees a chance to repurpose waste into a component for renewable energy and electric vehicles.

“Our motivation is to solve these puzzles and create knowledge to society’s benefit,” says Vander Wal, a professor in Penn State’s John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering, and also a professor in materials science and engineering, and mechanical engineering.

Puzzles shaping his research include some twenty million metric tons of discarded plastics that become litter each year. About three-quarters of plastics were being landfilled as of 2021, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

By introducing a small amount of graphene—a layer of carbon atoms—or graphene oxide nanomaterials to plastic waste like grocery bags and yogurt containers, Vander Wal and colleagues have found, treatment processes can transform the material to high-quality graphite. Graphite, classified as a critical mineral, is essential in lithium-ion batteries used for electric vehicles and renewable-energy systems. It’s also important in aluminum refining, steel manufacturing, and other industrial practices.

Because high-quality graphite has more value compared to conventional recycling, novel treatment processes amount to “upcycling,” according to Vander Wal, an Energy Institute affiliate. “If there’s enough available plastic in the world—tens of millions of tons—it would fulfill all graphite needs.”

The upcycling approach would strengthen incentives for industry to reuse the petroleum-based resource, Vander Wal says. As of 2018, plastics and petrochemical production made up about 14 percent of oil demand and 8 percent of natural gas demand, according to the International Energy Agency.

Manufacturing graphite from plastics would ease the need for imports of the resource as demand soars. Most of the U.S. supply comes from China; there are no domestic graphite mines, Vander Wal notes.

Supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the plastics-reuse work is moving through a proof-of-concept stage. Elsewhere in his research, Vander Wal is investigating biopolymers—large-molecule materials made by organisms, such as lignin and cellulose from plants—through a seed grant from the Materials Research Institute at Penn State. Like plastics, biopolymers represent a potential resource for large-scale production of high-quality graphite.

“Most of our work has been motivated by sustainability and a need for high-quality carbon, and other forms of carbon, for a range of purposes,” Vander Wal says. “With research contributions from graduate students, we have identified processes and conditions by which we can approach a scale-up and pilot-scale studies.”

Vander Wal is delving, too, into the decarbonization of natural gas—through a process known as thermocatalytic decomposition—to create varied forms of carbon for use as conductive additives, energy-storage media, and high-surface-area absorbents. The decomposition process yields clean hydrogen and could promote its wider adoption as an energy source, he says.

In leftover mines and abandoned gas and oil wells, Arash Dahi Taleghani sees prospects for clean energy production and storage.

Dahi Taleghani, a faculty affiliate of the Energy Institute, is in petroleum engineering in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering. As director of the Repurposing Center for Energy Transition (ReCET), he oversees studies of existing fossil-fuel infrastructure for new purposes.

“Across Pennsylvania and Appalachia, there are dozens of communities, townships, and counties with mines and gas and oil wells that are retired, decommissioned, or close to it,” Dahi Taleghani says. “As many places are looking to seal off these facilities without any future benefit, we’re looking to give them another life, create revenue, and help sustain these especially energy-dependent communities.”

Pennsylvania alone may have as many as 750,000 abandoned oil and gas wells, according to the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy, and its abandoned coal mine lands amount to some 250,000 acres.

In these spaces, ReCET collaborators are looking to facilitate uses such as geothermal energy production, water and hydrogen storage, and carbon-dioxide sequestration. Among early prospects over the center’s first five years, participating faculty have been investigating solar-energy generation and storage in the northeastern U.S., including Pennsylvania; the transformation of shallow wells into tunnels; and the placement of a data center in a former mine pit.

“We’re talking about towns, communities, and incomes that have been developed around energy infrastructure for decades, for generations. The social infrastructure has depended on it,” Dahi Taleghani says. “When that landscape flattens, what do you do next?”

In a recent study, Dahi Taleghani and Energy Institute colleagues developed a roadmap for leveraging slags—byproducts from the smelting process—as a foundation for technologies in thermal energy storage. Steel slags in particular may be useful for concentrated solar-power systems, the researchers wrote in a forthcoming paper.

Another paper, published in December 2025 in the journal Joule, offers recommendations for leveraging brines from geothermal environments as a source of critical minerals. Artificial intelligence could help refine recovery of those resources, Dahi Taleghani and his coauthors said.

“The next chapter won’t look like the past,” he says. “But through collaboration, we can chart a future that supports both these places and society’s shifting needs and expectations for energy.”

Tekin Ozdemir, operations director at the Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance and assistant research professor, holds boules produced in high-temperature furnaces. The boules are ready to be ground using the system behind him.
Credit: David Kubarek

Nearly as hard as diamonds, silicon carbide (SiC) is core to many applications requiring high power and is foundational to the clean-energy transition. The compound of silicon and carbon rarely appears in nature, but its properties—including heat resistance, overall stability, and high-voltage operability—make it an essential semiconductor for electric vehicles, renewable-energy systems, and technologically advanced “smart” power grids.

To help meet surging demand, the Arizona-based semiconductor manufacturer onsemi turned to researchers at the EMS Energy Institute. The global supplier needed its synthetic SiC supply to be defect-free, cost-efficient, and scalable.

onsemi already knew Penn State had top expertise in materials. Its request: With the company’s backing, could the University develop tooling and facilities for a dominant research operation—a contemporary foundry—to cultivate and refine large SiC crystals?

Joshua A. Robinson, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and an Energy Institute faculty affiliate, accepted the challenge as a landmark opportunity. In spring 2025, Penn State announced the Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance (SCIA) at University Park as an industry- and government-supported hub to lead SiC crystal science, technology, and workforce development.

Construction and tool installation began several months earlier, in October 2024.

“SiC is the critical semiconductor for the energy transition. The U.S. Department of Energy has identified it as such,” says Robinson, the SCIA director and inaugural director of strategic research initiatives in the Penn State College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. “The modeling and engineering we do here, across disciplines, is going to enable better crystals all while improving the efficiently and sustainability of the process.”

Since its July 2025 opening, researchers in SCIA’s pilot-scale foundry have been firing up industrial-grade furnaces to about two thousand degrees Celsius, nearly half the temperature of the Sun’s surface. For up to ten days at a clip, they bake a refined, gravel-like SiC product that becomes a boule—a cylindrical, glass-like crystal grown from the sublimation process.

From there, the team uses state-of-the-art grinding processes to shape the boule into a puck, then slices the puck into thin, six-inch-wide wafers that are washed and polished. As they refine production processes, researchers—including faculty and students—are exploring different source materials and other tweaks to improve crystal quality and manufacturing efficiency.

Just cooling a new boule takes days. They typically weigh from three to ten pounds.

“You cool it too quickly, and the whole thing cracks,” says Robinson—an expensive miscalculation as source material runs nearly $100 a pound. On the market now, a single wafer is worth around $1,500; a boule, upwards of $10,000.

The two-week process from gravel to wafer requires ten to fifteen steps and more than a half-dozen tools in the high-end facility, which was built with some $6.5 million in government and University funding. Annual industry support eclipses $1.2 million, most of it from onsemi.

Specific advancements now under development include an X-ray system to monitor boule growth inside the furnace. The technology, unique in the U.S., would help manufacturers identify and prevent problems quickly. Researchers are exploring, too, how to reduce energy use and environmental effects of production, prioritizing the reusability of key parts and less-impactful chemicals.

Another goal: larger SiC wafers as manufacturers switch from a six-inch to an eight-inch standard diameter that better supports devices.

Evan Krohn, undergraduate research assistant majoring in materials science and engineering, right, shows the final step in the silicon carbide growth process – a wafer wash and spin. Joshua A. Robinson, director of the Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance, looks on.
Credit: David Kubarek

“We can try approaches that industry wouldn’t be able to attempt,” Robinson explains. Commercial collaborators help to test the campus foundry’s innovations as the improvements take shape.

SCIA follows national priorities under the federal CHIPS and Science Act, signed in August 2022 to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry and reinforce manufacturing. The alliance likewise is instrumental to the Mid-Atlantic Semiconductors Hub, a coalition of top universities and industries founded by Penn State to buoy the industry.

“The alliance builds on the University’s early SiC programs, which centered on military applications through the Applied Research Laboratory,” says Clive Randall, distinguished professor of materials science and engineering. He directs the Penn State Materials Research Institute, an SCIA partner.

“We will learn by leading,” Randall says. “It’s the only way we continue to be a great university in the materials space—by taking risks, by doing, by hiring the right faculty who have a broad vision beyond their own laboratories. They carry through the societal aspect of what we’re doing.”

Growing and safeguarding domestic SiC capacity are especially vital given intense global competition in the market, Randall explains. “If it’s all coming from somewhere else, you don’t control your own destiny.”

He and Robinson describe open collaboration—across higher education, government, and industry—as the linchpin in the U.S.’ ability to compete. By late 2025, SCIA had assembled ten member institutions and was continuing to grow. Members range from onsemi itself, a naming partner in the operation, to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, which funded initial infrastructure.

Among the benefits of membership, participating organizations receive information on the alliance’s discoveries and progress. Higher-level members help determine SCIA’s research agenda and can even embed researchers within the alliance. Each institution commits to provide financial support.

“To have an international advantage, we need a higher level of science, and that’s why an open platform is the only way,” Randall says. “Opening the research approach makes it possible for a lot of depth in discovery.”

On the eastern edge of the Penn State University Park campus, a noxious byproduct of mining in the twentieth century—acid mine drainage—is offering new promise in the twenty-first as a source of critical minerals including rare earth elements, aluminum, cobalt, manganese, nickel, and zinc.

Sarma V. Pisupati, director of the Center for Critical Minerals, explains outputs of a pilot-scale test facility on the University Park campus during a legislative visit in September 2025.
Credit: David Kubarek

Researchers with the Center for Critical Minerals (C²M), housed in the EMS Energy Institute, have developed a patent-pending process to separate valuable minerals from the waste and other solutions. Using mine runoff trucked to campus from nearby Clearfield County, the team is turning environmental pollutants into a secondary source of critical minerals that can ease reliance on primary sources—like mines—and imports.

“In so many communities with retired coal, copper, and zinc mines, cleaning up contaminated runoff is already a pressing goal. It’s work that needs to happen, anyway,” says Sarma V. Pisupati, the C²M director. “Now that we can extract valuable minerals in the process, we can create additional value at the same time and help decrease the U.S.’ dependence on overseas sources.”

C²M secured $2.1 million in federal funding to design, build, and test its pilot-scale research and development unit in minerals extraction. The federal government designates critical minerals for their importance to the economy and national security, as they represent essential components for clean energy and military technology, electric vehicle batteries, cell phones, medical devices, the power grid, and other advanced systems.

To separate minerals from mine drainage, the pilot-scale unit employs a 4,000-gallon tank and a series of tanks, pumps, and filters. Each step of the process pulls another component from the liquid, using pH variations and ozone to create mineral precipitates and purify them to high levels of purity, around 90 percent.

By Pisupati’s rough calculation, one million gallons of drainage may yield about five pounds of precipitates, depending on mineral concentrations and environmental conditions. 

C²M’s industrial partners take the purified precipitates—solids culled from liquids—and improve their purity to nearly 100 percent. In the long term, the concept is for those high-purity precipitates to be used in a variety of crucial products. Coal-mining states including Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky could benefit from the innovation, which should help incentivize environmental cleanup, Pisupati says.

Acid mine drainage impairs more than 5,500 miles of streams in Pennsylvania alone, according to the state Department of Community and Economic Development.

“Compared with conventional handling practices for acid mine drainage, this new approach creates treated water that’s easier to dispose,” says Pisupati, who is a professor of energy and mineral engineering and chemical engineering. The post-treatment water is so clean—with no acidity—that it could be discharged anywhere, from streams to storm drains, he explains.

Minerals captured from the drainage could go into battery supply chains, contribute to alloy and magnet manufacturing for the defense industry, and be used in the aerospace industry, among other uses, says Mohammad Rezaee, associate professor in Penn State’s Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering. He helped develop the method in the pilot-scale operation.

“Working with our industry partners, we know there’s tremendous opportunity to commercialize these advancements in industrial scale,” Rezaee says. “Our process isn’t limited to coal and metal mine drainage but could be useful for separating minerals from oil- and gas-produced water, and leach solutions from processing primary and other secondary sources and recycled materials.”

At the pilot-scale level, the extraction method processes seven gallons per minute, says Larry Feinberg, a Boston-area entrepreneur and industry partner of C²M. Collaborative work should help amplify that rate by about twenty times, he says.

“The idea is to have a dual revenue stream—from treating the water and from the minerals we capture,” says Feinberg, founder and CEO of Petric Co.

With a growing complement of collaborators, C²M is looking to expand from the pilot scale to larger-scale field work in 2026. Waste streams including mine drainage, used electronics, and other refuse—all known as secondary sources—together could fulfill perhaps 30 percent of the U.S. need for critical minerals, Pisupati and colleagues project. 

Penn State is in a leadership position as federal authorities invest in developing critical minerals in the U.S., says Timothy White, a research professor in the University’s Department of Geosciences and the sustainability officer for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. He has recently investigated lithium in the Mercer geologic formation, long mined in central Pennsylvania for its coal and claystone deposits. 

“There’s every reason to believe we can develop the supply chain we need in North America,” White says. “We know how to do this right.”

Sarma V. Pisupati, director of the Center for Critical Minerals, speaks with Pennsylvania state Rep. Paul Takac during a legislative visit to a pilot-scale test facility on the University Park campus in September 2025. At left is Edgar Beltran, a Penn State undergraduate in energy engineering.
Credit: David Kubarek

Global challenges a call to innovate, collaborate — and lead

Hello, friends: 

Sanjay Srinivasan

Welcome to another edition of the Energy Innovation newsletter. The past year has seen several shifts in the energy landscape in our country and beyond. Our researchers continue to make important discoveries that are shaping how we will meet the energy demand in our communities. How we might leverage energy for economic growth, national security, and environmental restoration—all hinge on work happening each day in the field, in laboratories, and in classrooms. At the EMS Energy Institute, we welcome the opportunity to work on this important challenge of providing affordable and reliable energy to populations around the world. To ensure our community remains a leader in innovation, we’re transforming facilities, introducing a strategic plan, and redoubling institute commitments to student achievement and to engagement across the sector. 

Critical minerals are key in our research portfolio—a cornerstone of advanced electronics, defense technology, and the clean-energy transition. In the Center for Critical Minerals, we’re refining a pilot-scale operation that separates rare earth elements from mine runoff collected in Clearfield County, Pennsylvania. The groundbreaking facility showcasing our innovative technology is a prelude to what we expect will be larger field operations. It demonstrates how to recycle resources from an industrial past, support mineral needs, and build financial incentives for environmental clean-up, all simultaneously. 

Also in this issue of Energy Innovation, we’re happy to highlight progress in our Silicon Carbide Innovation Alliance. A joint endeavor with the Materials Research Institute at Penn State, this collaboration in crystal science operates in labs reimagined for a new generation of research. That alliance is a model for how the institute can form close collaborations with industrial entities that, in turn, can provide valuable resources that can be used to upgrade our facilities. We’re likewise expanding overall technical resources to make thorough analytical capabilities available to all our researchers, and, in the future, we would like to make those capabilities accessible to our external collaborators as well. 

The institute is a connecting point for undergraduate and graduate students, whose collaborations with researchers prepare them for rewarding careers. Taking part in experiences like CERAWeek, the top annual gathering in the energy sector, are pivotal. Nine Penn State students and a faculty member represented the institute as part of Innovators Row during CERAWeek for 2025, held in March in Houston. More than 10,000 people, including over 1,600 C-suite executives, participated. Penn Staters at CERAWeek delivered insight in an enviable breadth of subject matter, from organic photovoltaic research and battery-materials production to subsurface utilization in petroleum drilling. Taken together, their presentations captured the excitement and comprehensive posture of the institute’s work. 

To structure the activities of the institute, our community has worked over the past year to craft a comprehensive strategic plan. We now have a complete draft that incorporates our vision for cutting-edge research and close ties with industry. We’re proud to invite industry partners to help frame our research direction and educate and train the workforce. 

The plan also involves our refreshed organizational structure, featuring close collaboration with the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at Penn State (EESI). Like the Energy Institute, EESI is housed within the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Our EESI partnership provides both entities with a dedicated support team, including pre-award specialists who assist researchers with proposals; post-award project managers who help optimize research execution; and marketing and branding capabilities to engage the public, peers, internal constituents, and a constellation of supporters. 

As we welcome the 2026 calendar year, the Energy Institute has several prime events in store. A symposium will bring together high-level industry executives and our lab teams to address the direction of energy research, the demand for critical minerals and other materials, and environmental and social aspects of energy production and use. Then in July, we will host a major workshop, also at University Park, sponsored by the Society of Exploration Geophysicists. The workshop will center world-class experts in dialogue about artificial-intelligence applications in subsurface energy and storage. 

As scientists and innovators, we take seriously the responsibility to engage the broader world in our work. Success rests on our ability to collaborate—not only with one another but throughout the energy sector.  

To everyone joining us already, I share my thanks. To our readers here contemplating what’s possible: Let’s talk. Collaboration is a force multiplier. 

Sanjay Srinivasan 
Director, EMS Energy Institute 
Penn State