In Spring 2019, the EMS Energy Institute announced a new call for seed grant proposals to encourage exploratory and collaborative research with new ideas that will likely advance energy science and technology significantly and potentially lead to new externally funded research projects. 

Rice University and Penn State are teaming up to develop sophisticated fiber-optic sensors and seismic sources to find and evaluate small faults deep underground at sites that store carbon dioxide (CO2) to keep it out of the atmosphere.

The Institutes of Energy and the Environment (IEE) has awarded seed grants to 22 groups of interdisciplinary researchers at Penn State for the 2020-21 award cycle.

From making our roads safer to paving the way to exoplanet discovery, the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS) seed grants have funded 14 projects backed by researchers from across the disciplines and around the University. The 2021-22 ICDS seed grant program is designed to help scientists use the latest computational technology and cutting-edge data science techniques to deepen understanding and develop innovation across fields and disciplines.

Over the last decade, geothermal energy has progressed throughout the world as an environmentally friendly, sustainable source of energy. Using the heat from the Earth’s crust, geothermal power plants harvest and store energy in massive underground reservoirs carved out of stone. Once built, the reservoirs are inaccessible and monitored remotely — but not infallible. Earthquakes and more can fracture the subsurface rock, risking the integrity of the reservoir and endangering energy production.