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