Welcome. Good day, everyone. I'm Isabelle Montañas, Chair of the Board on Earth Sciences and Resources, what I'll refer to as Beaser. And I'd like to start by thanking you all for attending today's meeting. Today's focus is energy and resource needs for a nation in transition. We seek to learn more about the current energy and earth resources, research priorities and how these priorities are positioned or evolving to address changing societal demands to mitigate climate change and to decrease adverse social inequities and environmental impacts. So after I give a brief overview of the Beaser mission and discuss the meeting protocols, we'll be hearing from our keynote speaker, Brian Anderson, of the National Energy Technology Laboratory, as well as three panelists, Nicole Sanders from the Environmental Defense Fund, Rebecca Hernandez from UC Davis, and Ben Holton, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University and co-chair of the California Collaborative for Climate Change Solutions. After each presentation, there'll be time for questions from the board and the audience. And we'll be taking a 15 minute break at 2pm Eastern Standard Time, after which we will return for a panel discussion. Could I have the next slide please, Eric? The Board on Earth Sciences and Resources is the National Academy's focal point for activities and issues relevant to the solid earth sciences and resources. It's one of 11 boards in the Division of Earth and Life Studies, and together these boards comprise most of the national science portfolio of the academies. Other divisions cover engineering, policy, global affairs, and social sciences. Next slide please. We cover a broad topical space including a range of geologic hazards, energy and mineral resources and stewardship, geographic geologic and geospatial mapping and modeling, geological and geotechnical engineering, carbon sequestration and energy transition, strategic directions for earth science research, the intersection of geology and health, environmental justice and equity in earth science, and education workforce development and safety. So clearly much of our work has important societal implications. These are funding sources are diverse and showcase the breadth of earth sciences. Our core funding is currently supported by NSF's Division of Earth Sciences and the Geoscience Directorate, NASA's Earth Surface and Interior Focus Area, and DOE Basic Energy Sciences. USGS is a traditional sponsor with pending support. Next slide please. So in order to keep our pulse on emerging topics and to help prioritize areas that might be of interest to our sponsors and other federal agencies, we have a large board of volunteers. Today in the interest of time will not be introducing the members and staff but we present them here to acknowledge their contributions to the board. And I also invite you to look through the agenda booklet for more information on our members. I'd like to mention that we also have a new director, Dr. Deborah Glickson, who you see here, who oversees both the board on earth sciences and resources and the water science and technology board. Deb is a marine geologist who brings considerable experience to the board accrued over her tenure at the National Academy since 2008. And board members please introduce yourself when asking questions. There's a little bit about our zoom logistics board members please raise your hand virtual hands to ask a question. We'll be monitoring the virtual hand raising and we will call on you. Audience members will be taking questions through the Q&A box located at the bottom of your screen. Please type your questions into the box at any time click send. And staff members will be monitoring the Q&A and passing these questions to the moderators. I hope that this webinar is being recorded any questions you submit may be read aloud and include in our recording. And a link to the recording will be posted on our website. So we're really next slide please. We're pleased to have Brian Anderson as our kickoff speaker, who will be presenting paving the way to a decarbonized energy future. He is the director of the Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. And during his tenure at NETL if initiated critical technology development and deployment projects including direct air capture technologies for decarbonization. Chemical looping combustion with the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and non variable renewable energy for future low carbon power systems. And also the development and maturation of key technologies that are having significant industry impact, including microwave ammonia synthesis and carbon nanomaterials manufactured from coal. And Brian has just been named executive director of the White House interagency working group on coal and power plant communities and economic revitalization. And as a BESER member will be moderating questions after Brian's talk. Thank you so much for joining us Brian and I turn the screen over to you now. Thank you so much and BESER board thank you for the opportunity to speak a little bit today about at least NETL's role in the pathway toward decarbonization. As you all noted, I've also even very recently been asked by the White House to lead an interagency working group and coal and power plant communities economic revitalization. This is an 11 agency interagency working group spanning the entire federal government because of the acknowledgement of the fact that as we manage the energy transition. We have relied heavily on coal and natural gas and oil for more than a century in the United States and in those communities are in have built their economies around the earth resources that they have. And I think of the transition of the energy, our energy system into the future, being able to manage the pathway and transition of these communities that are reliant on the earth resources themselves. How do we, how do we craft a pathway forward and so that's part of the role of the interagency working group is to try to identify the pathways and opportunities for those communities. And some of them may in fact be technical solutions, like I might, I might present today. So I'm going to go ahead and share my screen now and jump into jump into the talk. I think it's, it's great to speak to the board, board on earth sciences resources, particularly because of the breadth and depth of the focus areas of BESER. I think that there's a real opportunity for us to rethink our energy resources into the future knowing that today 80% of our primary energy comes from the earth primarily. Well, 80% comes from fossil energy, even higher value higher number comes from the earth when we consider uranium as a primary energy source for for nuclear generation. So, when we consider how we're going to pay the path for a decarbonized energy future. We have to include the, the subsurface, and, and it's really inherent to all of the various pathways that we might envision of getting to a decarbonized energy future to set the stage for the role of any TL and the federal government, at least the Department of Energy, understanding that we have the Department of Energy National Laboratory system is important that we have our science laboratories, all shown here in the gray circles. These have our big user facilities, many of which have deep expertise and inner sciences and, and resources we have our three applied laboratories the Idaho National National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado focused on renewable energy, and any TL, you can see we have laboratories in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Oregon with field offices in Alaska and Texas. Historically, we focused on fossil energy but I would also add that for 25 years, we've been developing technologies for carbon capture and sequestration so, in fact we are, we're the fossil energy and carbon management laboratory is really our key focus area. One thing to note within our portfolio is not just fossil energy but as the Department of Energy's loan government and government operated laboratory we also steward some programs across the board to our mission, which is actually recently recently revised the purpose of any TL is to drive innovation and solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future and it's right at the nexus of environmental sustainability and a prosperous energy future where what we're focused on at any TL is to set out the goals of the modernized energy system of the future and doing it in a pathway that provides the optimal solution for the country doing it as fast as we can. And in a way that decreases economic dislocation increases energy justice and environmental justice in communities that have been impacted and will continue to be impacted by an energy transition into the future. This is a really tough challenge to try to manage all of those goals simultaneously and so we do it by developing affordable and abundant reliable energy through technologies that manage carbon across the full life cycle and that is a really important thing that is to understand the full environmental impact costs of all energy production and be being able to then manage and minimize environmental impacts the negative environmental impacts, so that we can ensure environmental sustainability for all Americans which includes environmental justice and communities that have been adversely impacted by energy production in the past. It includes energy justice and energy jobs moving moving forward into the future. And so the administration and in the national laboratory system that set out some really aggressive goals and constraints along our energy transition pathway, so that we can we can try to have a transition and many of you have heard that terminology and really to dig into what it means is that we have integrated looking at our vision that we have integrated solutions that include the trans transition of an economy the investment of infrastructure, as well as the investment of technologies that can achieve those missions of environmental sustainability and a prosperous energy future. And so any to you know I say here we're the only national lab dedicated to carbon research and so that's carbon and the full life cycle through and historically a lot of work in production of natural gas and oil including work in in the environmental to increase the environmental sustainability of show gas production, and how we can convert our carbon resources into higher value products and and and then provide opportunities for for resource rich communities so that they're not stuck with resource curse. I think that's really important in terms of adding value. So to get to know any to in case you know I know many of you on on on the webinar today are familiar with us but to get to know us a little deeper we have five core competencies and the research and innovation center which is our research arm. We have computational science and engineering materials engineering geologic and environmental systems, which one would say is that is our bees are armed but but in fact, our bees are work work that's related to these are is computational science and material science energy conversion engineering and also in our strategic systems analysis and engineering that includes the life cycle assessment work that we do as well as energy systems modeling across the whole whole spectrum. The top two horizontal lines and coal and carbon and natural gas and oil are what we've worked on our portfolio for over 100 years at our Pittsburgh facility and over 75 years and more in town in Albany. But we also work very closely with energy efficiency and renewable energy managing a significant portion of the vehicles program and geothermal and advanced manufacturing and buildings. The Office of Electricity and Caesar cyber security energy security and emergency response. So when you package all this together we, we really try to take a holistic systems level approach to the energy system as a whole integrated energy systems and then how we can manage the pathway of the energy transition to a decarbonize energy future. And so we look at the specific application areas are brought up life cycle analysis which is the middle of the, the nine boxes here, which really is how we evaluate the energy transition how we evaluate new technologies that will come on to be able to manage, not just carbon across the life cycle including all of its potential emissions and greenhouse gas greenhouse gases as a whole, but also the full environmental impact associated with energy production of all energy technologies and there in comes some of the things we'll talk about later today and critical materials, critical minerals rare elements and things like that. And then another whole suite of technologies that that that we work on and chemical recycling. It was mentioned in the intro microwave catalysis being able to lower energy barriers to even manufacturing processes, material synthesis gasification and hydrogen processing and and hydrogen distribution and hydrogen production as a as a potential lever to decarbonization as a as an energy carrier down down the future and so again our leadership and life cycle assessment really drives a lot of our decisions and investments in in research of technologies of how to decarbonize our energy future. So this comes in, I mentioned the strategic systems analysis and engineering, when it comes to the life cycle assessment technology, techno economic assessments, and then the impacts of research investments on the goals that we've set forth for the aggressive decarbonization, understanding the pathways that we can move along the the entire energy system portfolio to again aggressively tackle tackle the climate crisis to develop technologies to reduce the carbon impact and full greenhouse gas impact of our energy technologies, and doing it in a way that one can imagine a multi variable optimization process where a constraint might be the goal of the carbonized electricity sector by 2035 fully the carbonized net zero economy by but doing it across a set of decisions over these next 20 or 30 29 years that minimize any negative economic impacts, as well as optimizing the opportunities of energy communities is is really the grand challenge that we're working on, not just in any way across the entire national laboratory system. So we think of the pathways to the carbonization here is just just a sampling of some of the scenarios for CO2 abatement and mitigation and minimization of the energy system globally. So we look at the international energy agency bp's net zero pathway bp's business as usual pathway they're in green e is examples Excel mobiles scenario and then the rapid decarbonization example from BP and if we look at these particular they all require very aggressive and very near term action and certainly those those actions have been taken if you look at the trend line from 2000 down to the 2020 there's US related CO2 emissions that have been decreasing and frankly in large part to simultaneously employing zero emitting renewables as well as tremendous shift in the power generation fleet from coal into natural gas we know that you know back in just just over a decade ago we were producing about 52% of our electricity from coal today it's 24% with a large part of that shift going in the natural gas and decrease in the emissions, but that certainly opens up as as the folks at EDF have very capably examined that has the potential of leading to methane emissions through the transportation and distribution of natural gas which is again a major challenge that that's part of our portfolio is the methane emission estimates as well as mitigation targets. So anyway you put you put it all together and we need some very aggressive pathways to decarbonization to get to a net zero economy in 2050 shown only by the BP net zero example here on this this particular set of six scenarios. So when we look at how we're going to build those decarbonization scenarios again just one example of the pathway the set of wedges of decarbonization as illustrated by the International Energy Agency, which very graciously allowed David Turk to step away from the IEA and join us in the Department of Energy as the Deputy Secretary recently, but the IEA has shown all of the pathways include certainly lots of electrification of the transportation sector as well as the industrial sector which is often overlooked when we talk about decarbonization pathways. Other renewables in addition to hydrogen well hydrogen is an energy carrier not necessarily renewable but the bioenergy wind solar technology performance to drive down or to drive efficiency. They all require the onset of carbon capture utilization and sequestration at some point in onset and you can see that right now there's a lot of deployment of renewables and then certainly when we consider some of the constraints specific to the electrical grid and increased demand of the electrical grid through electrification of industrial and transportation sectors requires us to be able to deploy low or zero carbon on demand power generation firm power that can provide the resilience of the grid that we so require. Now certainly there's been a lot of discussion around the polar vortex in Texas earlier this year and in regards to the blame or the share of blame that would be borne by all of the different components of the system under a very unique and rare polar vortex in Texas. But it does come down often to the structure of the market and so when we think of all of the technology solutions that we have at our disposal, be it load following and and on demand power. In fact, you know a lot of the, a lot of the post mortem on the Texas incident comes down to the fact that there is the reserve margin that was low and the structure of the market and and and the lack of a capacity market. And so we can come up with all of the technologies that can solve many of our energy problems at low cost, but they all require some policy drivers, or market solutions and market structures that are often not driven by by technologies in fact. So, again, when we look at the various decarbonization scenarios we do see a very strong need for the entire geosciences community to step up, not just in CC us for sure, but in the sustainable pathways are producing critical materials, and there are various elements that we need to to power the renewable economy, and then also certainly advanced batteries and the, the great geologic needs associated with materials and, and driving sustainability across all of the sectors including you know say cobalt production in the Congo, as one example. I consider all of the different technology pathways as we mentioned we historically at any to have done baseline like life cycle analysis retrofit studies for coal and natural gas for power. But as we're moving into a rapid decarbonization of our energy system, we are. We're now expanding our analyses to include certainly negative emissions technologies that was mentioned in the intro about director capture as one of the levers that will need to be pulled. When we get to deep decarbonization of those hard to decarbonize segments of the economy, particularly around the industrial sector, where there are really difficult components of our economy to decarbonize that we will need negative emissions including biomass energy with CCS that's a bex and director capture as levers to pull for us to get to a full net zero. And this is certainly in addition to what the the pathway for for our existing coal fleet with accelerating retirement in the near future, as well as natural gas that is currently being deployed at a very high rate in the United States and how we can retrofit or even develop technologies that would be deployed in real time on the coal fleet and the natural gas fleet, so that we understand how to how to navigate navigate the decarbonization pathway. And then, when we're targeting the carbonization of the entire economy, we must look at the industrial sector, particularly some of the heavy industry that has a very large CO2 footprint like cement. And glad, see we're going to have some enhanced weathering discussion later later in this meeting today as well as the opportunity for hydrogen production, and then again life cycle assessment, as you can see there's a there's a theme. So to give you an update of where we are, in terms of carbon capture and sequestration technologies. Looking across the across the spectrum from natural gas and industrial capture. There's a lot of advances beyond the traditional deployed, I mean, sorbent and solvent processes that have have been matured through the chemical industry or have been deployed on demonstration basis from coal burning power plants but when we look at some of the challenges and opportunities for capture of different different CO2 rich streams like an industrial, industrial capture often, often we do, we have high compositions of CO2 in the streams, not like in natural gas where we, we might have 7% CO2 coal being 14% we may have 50% CO2 and some industrial streams. And so a whole suite of technologies to be able to capture carbon at low cost has been has been our focus in the direct air capture space. We have started work and computational screening. This is has on has been ongoing. As a matter of fact, one of our, one of our projects we were able to screen over a million combinations of a polymer organic framework with with molecular organic framework in a composite material with polymers, we screened over a million different types of materials identifying four out of the million talk about a needle out of a haystack to identify for that showed great promise and decrease in cost of capture using a hollow fiber sorbent. And we've also been developing this bias sorbent which, in fact is a particular type of material that can not only absorb CO2 but matter of fact is pretty useful to absorb things like lead and drinking water and even rare earths as it as it turns out. And so in the director capture space, it is about capturing from a very low concentration for an hour per million. But we see a glide path for some of the costs of carbon capture and director capture not to not to reach the low levels of $30 per ton. This is a target for capture from industrial sources and coal and natural gas, but still some, some lower costs of capture that can come on again to offset some of the hard to be carbonized parts of the economy. The big area is in using hydrogen as the energy carrier where today the bulk of the vast majority in the 90 90 percentile of hydrogen that's on the market today is produced from from fossil resources, most of it from natural gas. So we can drive down the cost again of carbon capture for hydrogen creating blue hydrogen. Then we have an energy carrier that's not carrying carbon with it. And again, tremendous potential to, to not only have a hydrogen as an energy carrier and possibly a transportation sector, but certainly parts of the hard to decarbonize industrial sector like steel manufacturing for instance there are options at the substituting substituting hydrogen and for carbon rich steel for for iron ore reduction. And then a program that was kicked off a couple of years ago and coal first coal first is about flexible innovative resilience small and transformative technologies that are net zero CO2 emissions or even in some instances net negative with biomass that are driving toward a modular small small energy production with modular CO2 capture that could possibly be deployed in the entire plant communities replacing CO2 emitting energy generation. So as a goal for our whole integrated CC us program carbon capture and carbon storage. On on the timeline we are rapidly approaching integrated CCS projects to be deployed and these are the second generation CCS technologies that have been have been demonstrated at the laboratory scale scaled up at a test facility called in triple C the National Carbon Capture Center in Wilsonville, Alabama, sometimes deployed and monst at Norway for scale up, and then again going back to the need for policy drivers 45 q as the tax credit for CCS projects is providing a bit of the market pull for technologies to then be deployed by by 2025. Now, we then are driving toward transformational technologies, deploying over the next 10 years. These transformational technologies have cost drivers driving down the cost of carbon capture to $30 per ton of metric ton of CO2, or even lower. And one of the real challenges is understanding how the CO2 would be sequestered in the subsurface. And we have spent many years with partnerships across the across the United States to first characterize the potential for CO2 sequestration in the subsurface. Secondly, the potential for permanence of the CO2 and subsurface. We are to reduce the risk that risk being risk of leakage risk of induced seismicity for large scale carbon capture and sequestration. And, as we as we see we're integrating the CCS projects regionally we have the regional partnerships as well as programs called carbon safe, which is about the safe storage, long term storage, permanent storage of CO2 in the subsurface. And, and we have a, we really are starting to have a great understanding of the potential in the subsurface. And now, we would need all of the surface infrastructure in place be at CO2 pipelines, and, and the carbon capture system as a whole. And coming back to the understanding that you know everything from the EIA predictions of what the pathway to decarbonization would include in order to have full deep decarbonization of our energy system, while maintaining the constraints around resiliency and reliability, and the ability to have net zero power on the grid. We, we do need to deploy CCS in the subsurface. Alright, so changing, slightly changing the focus, but the application still being the same we have kicked off an institute called the Science Based Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Institute, which its focus in Sammy is really it's about physics based, or here you can science based artificial intelligence and machine learning to where instead of historically and this is not a knock on data science or artificial intelligence or machine learning. To date, most of the algorithm development in AI and machine learning and large data analytics have been focused mostly around empirical models and using the structure of the algorithms and the learning algorithms and the computational science base focused on empirical models, even using neural networks and, you know, smart learning algorithms that are not always driven around science based science based models. And so our focus is to bring the science based models and subject matter experts on the physics of a system to the data scientists and computational scientists to have this focus on on physics based models coupled with the artificial intelligence strategy. And so the whole logo soup around the top or a number of the different projects or platforms that we have used or across the national lab system have used to try to drive towards physics based and science based artificial intelligence machine learning. The top left one see there is smart that that's specifically on the subsurface. I'll talk about that a little bit a little bit more. But then other other examples, one in particular right in the middle bottom edx, the energy data exchange is a data platform with smart algorithms built into it for how the data come in and adding metadata. So that these data rich environments are informed by by the situational awareness of data collection. And then one other particular example ideas which is on the bottom row the fourth one over ideas is our Institute for design of advanced energy systems and and like the others like smart and edx and extreme map. This is a collaboration of multiple national laboratories it's Berkeley National Lab PNL Sandia Los Alamos and ETL and this and and some academics like Carnegie Mellon University. And this is a entire platform built to be able to bring in science based models, coupled across time and link scale, and ideas can in fact simulate all the way down to a material in a power plant, up to how the grid works on a day to minute ahead grid market, so we can understand the effects of cycling on the grid on the materials themselves within a power plant. And so that to move from those time and link scales is really a tremendous tremendous breakthrough. So here's some platforms I've mentioned edx we have our our jewel supercomputer and our what Center for artificial intelligence and machine learning what's actually the name of the computer itself. That is focused on data science, and in particular and on the next slide I want to talk about data science and subsurface. And it is specific what is specifically designed for very fast ingestation of data and the ability to analyze across huge data sets in rapid time, and we're at the point in human computational systems that we don't understand how big 16 petabytes are. In fact 16 petabytes would store the Library of Congress the world's largest data collection would store the Library of Congress 1020 three times, and the speed at which we can ingest that data if you took the Library of Congress, printed it out and eight and half by 11 sheets of paper one inch margins 10 point font double sided and cheap paper, it would, it would stretch from Washington DC to St. Louis and we can read it and about four miles per second is how fast we can, we can read and analyze not just read and analyze that data. And this is important because the data sets we're facing in the subsurface are becoming very large, very large yet often sparse and so that presents some interesting computational challenges that we're trying to attack in the smart initiative. So smart initiative is how we can use science based artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate accelerate an understanding of subsurface processes. We have a pretty broad technical team, all focused on how we can, we can better adapt our understanding of processes that happen in the subsurface everything from subsurface chemistry to fluid flow, even to the propagation of hydraulic fractures and the application of the spaces and carbon sequestration as well as oil and gas production, and in the long term ramifications of CO2 storage. Another area of unlocking the potential in the subsurface by using data driven assessment methods. And this is largely driven out of our Albany laboratory with our pretty deep geospatial data analytics is a new method to assess the rare earth, rare earth element potential within sedimentary environment so that's already said. And so it's this geodata science driven approach, so that we can assess rare earths and coal and other sedimentary environment systems, so that we can understand and identify the potential for extraction of rare earths from our existing resources as well as our environmental remediation opportunities, be it acid mine drainage sludge, or ash ponds that contain a significant amount of rare earth elements that could be driven into our US supply chain of rare earths. They're so critical to everything from the permanent magnets and and wind turbines and electric vehicles to our GPS systems and our cell phones. And so this is a real challenge given the current status of of the supply chain. So we're trying to unlock the promising resources using artificial intelligence machine learning from historical and geologic data understanding not just the current status but geologic processes that will have led to the concentration of rare earth elements in the subsurface. So the geologic processes at the basin scale, all the way through the mapping of the sedimentary environment through geologic history to today's state. And then confirmed by sampling and we we've just entered a partnership with USGS, where we are sharing all of our data that we have across the entire entire federal government and the subsurface to understand how we can unlock new resources for bears and other critical materials. And so it scales all the way from the SEM scale you can see from the micron scale up to basin scale mapping and modeling of the geologic processes in the sedimentary environments. So our portfolio in the rare earth space spans across really the entire supply chain, extraction pathways of extracting rare earths and other critical materials, critical minerals, as well as field tests and pilot validation, scaling up and understanding the possibility of moving, moving the market in the United States and in the life cycle assessment again not just for this is not just CO2 missions this is the full environmental impact cost of the production of our rare earths and critical critical minerals, so that we can ultimately build into the potential for new material discovery new alloy development, and, and certainly opportunities for demand growth in rare earths and critical elements these are some of the examples of where we use these rare earth elements across the entire supply chain and certainly as we drive down the decarbonization pathway over the next 29 years as I said, we are going to have an increased demand for these rare earths and critical elements of not just the need to understand how to extract how to extract cleanly and environmentally friendly ways how to purify alloy, but then ultimately end of life and recycle are all critical to our pathway for decarbonization. And so my goal was to leave some time today for for discussions questions I, I know that there's an audience that I hope we have a really, a really good discussion. So I'm just going to close with the fact that we can, we cannot do any of the work we do at any TL or the interagency working group across 11 agencies without a robust portfolio partnerships. And ATL have over 600 partnerships and 1000 different R&D projects across the country, it is an every all 50 states. And, and certainly it is the benefit of all of these project partners that we have the opportunity in front of us to to decarbonize and so I'm glad that we have such a robust partner set. There are many different ways because I mentioned we were to go a go go laboratory we issue funding opportunity announcements we also partner in cooperative development research and development agreements and small business innovative research agreements and so there's a whole plethora of ways that we want to get engaged with with partners across the country. And so with that, I'm going to thank the organizers for the opportunity for me to speak about what I wanted to talk about today, but I really look forward to engaging conversation so we can we can see where we go in the conversation and open it up to questions. Thank you very much. Hi, Brian. This is Jim slutes, a member of the user and thanks so much for that. That great opening and really great stage setter for this whole discussion on research and the energy transition. I want to thank the reminder to folks, the members of the board that are that are on the that that are that we can see you can use the, you raise the hand and we'll call on you if you have a question to ask and those on the webinar if you would just type your the Q&A box will get to as many questions as we can we have a nice set of time here for discussion so this is great. Just while we're getting kind of things lined up. Brian, let me kick us off you kind of did quite a bit of discussion there on the end on critical minerals and that's kind of a and materials that's kind of a key current issue within this board is our resources were in the middle of a webinar series on critical materials and I, I saw recently that any TL issued a significant funding announcement for critical minerals related to coal mine waste and recovering minerals from from from coal related issues. And, and so I was wondering because part of the thing is we look at this and and I be remiss without mentioning you mentioned IEA IEA released a new report on critical minerals which is is quite eye opening for those that haven't seen it on the challenges of what is the demand in the future and how do we meet it. And this is the issue because we know there's an any TL does a lot but it's it's not always clear for those of us that work on this where in the federal government. This critical minerals issue, both as is managed and looked at we know USGS tracks kind of current, you know, a lot of information, but from a research perspective because it's going to be more and more important. Is this going to be a, is this an evolving area where DOE is expanding broader beyond just some of the traditional areas to you. Is there is there more of a government wide initiative on this is there stuff you can share on how we might look at this from a US government managing the critical minerals and particularly research. Jim that that's great and so in the so the Department of Energy interests are are twofold I one within the fossil energy space as well as geothermal. So this is the earth resources space within the department. We have identified that there is an opportunity for a resource base of rarest and critical materials. And so the geothermal technologies office has had a had some efforts in the past that they've funded for extraction of critical minerals from geothermal brines and things like that. We identified within the fossil energy space that the sedimentary environments of coal have some increased levels particularly the heavy rares. And so our focus has been of being able to leverage the resources side, but then when I say that the critical minerals effort of the department is twofold. It's because within the energy efficiency and renewable energy space knowing that the demand for critical minerals in in the renewables development is so high there's also a real focus on how we can increase critical minerals and rare earth elements into that supply chain for renewables deployment. And so that's really the the breath of rarest and critical minerals as a focus within the Department of Energy we did just stand up the division of minerals sustainability within the office of fossil energy. There's also a lot of work over in the re now the whole government approach we have worked with some of our partners, certainly in an interior and USGS as I mentioned, understanding the resource base as a whole. And in Department of Defense, frankly, because of their supply chains, but the technologies that we're working on are. There's a merge point within a supply chain of moving it from a resource say an acid mine during each sludge, you make a rare earth oxide and then once you have a rare earth oxide. The supply chain really converges with almost any, any source of rare earth that you would you would have be at mountain pass as a historical rare earth mine. And our focus then is on the environmental sustainability of the process of purifying and allowing into the final metal so I think we're doing quite a bit of work across the whole supply chain that respect but it's not covering the whole federal government. Okay, thanks Brian. Hey, one of the questions that came in, I have a couple board members to go to and I'll go to them in just a second but, but I see one of the questions is a personal favorite of that I particularly resonates with me that someone's just because Brian, you and I and probably very few others have been to Albany, Oregon. And so when somebody and and realize what a jewel that facility is. And so, can you share a bit more about the focus and efforts taking place at the Albany, Oregon lab and I think I think this is a great opportunity for you to champion a little bit out because I just it was one of the my favorite field visits when I was at DOE years ago. Yeah. Thanks for seeing that one out. So in Albany, I'll start historically I'm not going to go through a whole history but during the Second World War the Albany Albany Research Laboratory was founded to work on a new metals, metals and metal alloys. Over the course of the last 75 years, the Albany Research Facility has spun out a whole specialty metals alloy industry in that part of West Central Oregon. And so our focus is still on advanced alloys advanced alloy processing we have really unique facilities that are able to scale up and develop new materials and new metals in particular any alloying but more recently we've expanded a lot of the research we do in Albany to include that geospatial data analytics we have this great team, huge team called Gaia, which is a geologic geospatial team. They're focused in Albany and just tremendous assets there. So while Albany is the smallest of our three laboratory facilities. It does have still continues to have great impact and one of the, one of the great inventions out of the Albany laboratory in addition to metals over the course of the years but was actually is a biocompatible metal heart stent that is in use all across the world patents in Japan and the United States and, and as credited with saving many many hundreds of millions of lives as a as a biocompatible metal heart stent. Thanks Brian yeah and, and just if I could just add one thing because it's is the other lives they've said is is the current state of the art body armor used by by the US military which is a huge national defense and and accomplishment so let's go to a couple board members. First we have Rob Bob Kleinberg Bob. Okay, there we go. Hello Brian, very nice to see you again. And now I understand what 16 petabytes is really quite was able to visualize that. But the question I want to ask is about seasonal energy storage. Right now, the United States uses something like 5% of its natural gas production to sort of level the load between summer and winter consumption of energy. It seems to me that that's only going to grow as renewables have become more important. We don't get much solar energy here in Boston during the winter. So do you have an outlook as to how we're going to decarbonize and maybe expand our seasonal energy storage. I think that's a, that's a really good point Bob and not only. The quick answer is no I don't have a great handle on it at the moment. We're still working on it. That's the short answer. But what one additional complexity is not just with seasonal energy storage. That would be enhanced and increased by deeper dependent deeper solar penetration on a seasonal basis, but then on a daily basis as that. If the big trend line grows, then the, the daily variation will grow as well and so even higher variations. And so that is one thing that we still have to manage. And so right now, I mean, it's not to not to paint a bleak picture, but the, the natural gas infrastructure is particularly in the Northeast is operating on a pretty fine edge. When it comes to delivering natural gas on demand in the wintertime when power power plant needs increase but yet homes are heated with natural gas. That's all part of a very complex problem which any imbalance creates in a possible possible issues that we saw just a couple of years ago in Michigan under in my so when one natural gas compressor plant went down compressor station went down that ended up resulting in about 12 automotive facilities shutting down because it knocked out power and and so we are we operate the energy system at very tight margins. And as we drive aggressively to decarbonization it's going to throw off a lot of the balances that we have to just manage we have to be out in front and have to manage them very actively in order to maintain the resiliency that we that we require. Well, I certainly urge you to keep that in the forefront of your. Thanks, Bob, a broad viewing. Right. Brian thank you very much for the interesting talk and the comprehensiveness of the presentation. I'm glad and even though what you presented is a pretty sweeping portfolio of research topics and charges. How does any TL interact with other sources of renewable energy, their support within DOE, and in particular I'm interested in the absence of any mention of nuclear energy. The absence of mentioning a nuclear is just simply that we don't we don't manage any of that portfolio it's all out of the Idaho lab. But the nuclear is, you know, I just, I may have absolutely not mentioned it but it has to be a critical part of the portfolio under, you know, zero carbon scenarios. And it is the one no zero carbon emitting firm power that on on the market today and so it certainly advances in small modular reactors to allow some flexibility and the possibility for load falling is a huge direction of the nuclear energy to to contribute to the portfolio and then driving down costs and inherently lead time for permitting and building nuclear reactors on our fleet. And then, and then the social acceptance to come along with that as well is critically important for us to as a part of the portfolio is a decarbonization. And that's kind of an opinion. The facts are that there's a huge portfolio in a nuclear space in the office of nuclear energy that I my apologies I didn't touch on today. Just just a quick follow up. I mean, centerpieces of what you're doing is the life cycle analysis. And of course within nuclear energy and DOE that's a big question. Is there a process by which the life cycle analysis for nuclear and other energy resources is developing policy. So, so in short, yes. And so a major part of the portfolio in the office of nuclear energy is is the stewardship of the life cycle of the nuclear material the visionable material, and in particular waste and, and it does get into very sensitive topics around a political topics around the places like yucca mountain and, and the like and, and so it is a critical part of the assessment of the department department as a whole under the under secretary for science and energy, where fossil renewables and nuclear all sit. And so it is a it is a critical part.  They're different to difficult to compare one one to another and that's where there's a lot of social policy and social equity questions that come up. Okay, thank you. Thanks Rod. Hey, hey Brian, we just have a few minutes left so what I'm going to do if you're okay we'll do some of these questions more like a lightning round I'll just, I'll touch on a few different questions. And then maybe you can do some wrap up comments to try to address those. And so we'll, there's one about efforts to decarbonize over, you know, for a 30 year period and, and are there. What do you see as, as kind of critical policy actions that might be needed to implement those. Let me, let me add to that, or what are some of the critical path items in research maybe as well I think would be of interest to people that you're seeing. And then there's a question about it's, it's under methane sequestration but I think the broader you know methane is getting a lot of attention the UN issue to report last week about it. You know what what some of the a little bit more on your, you know, methane reduction and some of the technology areas. And, and then the, the final issue is the broader than, than is these transformative technologies and sometimes government, the government regulations don't really accommodate new technology well. So kind of pathways on regulation that maybe that interface between technology and regulation so three things kind of critical, critical policy and or research methane and and regulation. So I'm going to lump the policy and regulation together is that we needed it, we, we do need a comprehensive energy policy framework that you know right now. So we have a combination of investment tax credits and production tax credits 45 q looks kind of like a production tax credit. When you compare it to the PTCs on wind and solar. So really a real comprehensive policy portfolio that touches on investing in technologies to move them over the barrier but then we certainly don't have a policy framework for the pathway of reduction of CO2 as a whole so we need that. And that includes that policy framework needs to include the ability and the regulatory environment to be able to permit new, new projects. More rapidly, particularly if, if we see that CO2 sequestration is necessary. We will have interstate pipelines and CO2 and the ability to permit that and move it forward using existing existing rights of way technologies that we need. Finally, grid scale storage is remains one of the big, the big issues to be able to handle the hour by hour variability of increasing variable renewables on under the grid. In addition to, you know, I think that CC us is a critical pathway. Once we get to 60 or 70% decarbonization. We really must have CC us technologies ready to go. So then we have long lead term items in order to be ready for that and that includes a lot of the infrastructure that needs to get out front. And then I'll shoot I missed them one in the middle. Oh methane methane, you know we have a pretty robust portfolio and detection of methane. So, across the entire infrastructure portfolio to be able to detect where it is. We have to memorize and measure and quantify a methane emissions, as well as new technologies for even converting a natural gas compressor stations, as well as new materials to to mitigate methane. Now in terms of, you know, the question see sequestration methane we store as Bob mentioned, we store methane natural gas underground as it is today. And if you capture the methane you would end up using it.  Well Brian thanks so much for joining us today thanks for this great kickoff and let's let's all give Brian a virtual round of applause for this great opening. So we'll look forward to staying engaged with you Brian and any TL and I know I know the, the board and all of our committees as well as other places in the National Academy of Science Engineering medicine really consider the any TL relationship critical. I thank you for the opportunity. And with that, let me let me hand hand the, the, the mic over to Brenda Bowen who is going to moderate our next panel today. Thank you. Great, thank you Jim. So we have a great panel lined up for today where we'll be exploring the land and water impacts and trade offs of the energy transition that we've been talking about. We'll hear about produced water about renewable energy sustainability and enhanced weathering speakers will touch on resource needs industry relevance environmental impacts and connections to communities. The next speaker is done will have a few minutes for questions and so please feel free to enter your questions into the into the Q&A as we're hearing their, their presentations. And then we will take a short break and then come back together for a full panel discussion with the, with the whole group. We'll begin our panel with Nicole Saunders. Nicole is a senior attorney with the environmental defense fund in their energy program. Her work is devoted to ensuring that science based regulations policies and industrial practices are in place to reduce human health and environmental impacts from energy development. This is on the management and disposal of oil and gas wastewater, as well as policies to ensure environmental integrity in emerging carbon capture and sequestration projects. Nicole, thank you for being with us here today, and I'll pass it over to you. Thank you so much. I'm going to share my screen quickly. I'll see slide one of my presentation. We're not seeing it yet. Here it goes. Yep. Great. Took it a little second but we're there. All right, thank you so much. So I'm going to kick it off. I just want to thank the National Academies and this board for having me today to have this great discussion as we speak on the theme of transition. I'm actually really glad to have this opportunity to talk to you about a more of an emerging issue in the energy water arena, which is the growing interest in looking at oil and gas wastewater or produce water for its reuse potential. So for many years now, EDF has been collaborating with academics, industry and other experts to better understand the science of produce water and its chemical character treatment and toxicity. All of that towards being able to inform policy and regulatory decision making as this question evolves. And so please bear with me as I try to move through some of our most recent findings and data for your consideration at kind of a quick pace to stay on track today. Produce water, as I'm sure most of you all know, is a mixture of formation groundwater chemical and fluids used in production and anything that results from the mixture of these two things. It returns to the surface with oil and gas and in many like places it returns a much larger volumes actually than the hydrocarbon itself. Nationally a little over a trillion gallons of produce water surface annually and the predominant method for managing this waste stream both historically and today is the reinjection over 90% of produce waters managed this way. However, as regions grapple with the effects of climate change, drought, disposal challenges like seismicity and other business and economic streams, many are beginning to look at this waste stream as for its potential as a resource and so there are numerous numerous recent publications and plans that identify this issue that you could look to for a broader discussion. One of those is EPA's water reuse action plan, which includes produce water and one of the five major sources of water for potential reuse. The Brownwater Protection Council's report on produced water is arguably the best existing primer on the multiple facets of this issue I'm somewhat biased I should disclose I was one of the authors and on the leadership group for this. But it really is a fantastic resource and includes multiple modules on things like research needs technical considerations regulatory considerations. I just want to highlight that at the Permian Basin which is kind of a hotspot for this issue no pun intended necessarily but New Mexico is in year two of a research consortium aimed at addressing some of these questions related to reuse and Texas is moving towards likely passing a bill that will set up a similar stakeholder group. So what are we really talking about when we talk about produce water reuse in this context so there are two main buckets, utilizing produce water to supplement or replace freshwater use for all field operations as a chief among these alternatives. And if it's conducted in a manner that really reduces spills and leaks this is this is a really good forward momentum opportunity. It's a positive move away from putting pressure on local freshwater resources for development. I'm actually not going to spend my time talking with you about this option for reuse today. What I want to spend more time about are these alternatives to look at the release of reuse of treated produced waters outside of the oil and gas environment. These are come with much more complex considerations surrounding identifying and appropriately managing risk a chief among these challenges is a really a foundational limitation in our knowledge, regarding the, the more comprehensive chemical and toxicological nature of produce water, combined with a present lack of really updated regulatory programs that are designed to manage this wastewater in these new ways and that's primarily due to a lack of a historical need for this kind of research around produce water because of the tradition of managing water through underground injection. So with the time I have today I want to give you a really high level overview of these issues and better and eds work to better elucidate the challenges ahead. So a key area of work for us has been focused on trying to tease out what we know and don't know about the chemicals in produce water itself, because we've identified this as a as a real challenge. So, our health scientists worked with Texas A&M and the endocrine disruption exchange to review the literature and identify studies on produce water, which and we use that to develop a comprehensive database and a framework to prioritize those chemicals that paper and the database are available in the research source journal that DOI is on your slide. So in this first review we identified a little under 1200 constituents and produce waters naturally nationally and so using this database we were able to do things. And across research across other forms of information so for example, we were able to take our database and crosswalk it with available toxicological data and see what we have for these produce water constituents and it turns out the answer is really very little so less than 14% of the constituents in this database have the type of toxicity you would need to conduct really a good risk assessment. And we were also able to look at how these chemicals were represented on other lists or databases like regulatory programs that might apply if you look to discharge or reuse and I'm going to talk about that more here in a moment. One key point I want to make quickly about the database is a really a notable limitation in the data set. We are limited to gathering data only where produce waters have been tested and studied and only on what was actually look forward so that common issue of you're only going to find what you're looking for. So regional variation is a really important example. On this slide I have two graphics on the one on the right represents the latest compiled data in a report form on produce water volumes alone. And it's kind of an intensity map so I've circled the area in the Southwest where is the Permian basin where we see large volumes and where there's this growing interest in alternative forms of reuse. And on the contrast on the left is a distribution of our produce water studies that we compiled by state and you can see that these two things don't overlap so the states producing really high volumes of produce water and investigating its reuse are really drastically under represented in the published literature. So generally speaking, we don't have enough data about produce water, but a more important point is that decision makers especially regulators really need information about their region specific produce water and that's because produce waters highly variable. You know if you look at geography geology time operator to operator, well to well day to day we can generalize. Yes, but the regional data will be really key and making informed and protective decisions. And we don't necessarily have enough of it where we need it. So I want to turn now to share a little bit more specific data and talk about what these research challenges and knowledge gaps might mean in a regulatory context as we think about the potential for expanded reuse. So really quickly from a regulatory framework and simply put the frameworks for produce water discharge and reuse are pretty limited. They really weren't written with the idea of widespread discharge and reuse in mind and don't usually specifically address the constituents of concern we find in literature and produce water. Because it represents the most comprehensive existing framework I'm going to focus on surface discharges in the Clean Water Act today. But a huge asterisk here is that this framework that I'm talking about in this initial analysis that we've done is not for discharges outside of the Clean Water Act so other scenarios that are considered like land application irrigation awkward for recharge. They really have little to know applicable standards or regulatory programs that are specifically equipped to consider and apply to reuse of produce waters and the constituents were concerned about there so put that on as a major gap that's worth further research. But in the NPDES program under the Clean Water Act. The basic rule of thumb is that no discharge of produce water is allowed direct from an operating site with two key exceptions to know about. First an operator can transport their produce water offsite to a POTW or a CWT. These are two types of treatment facilities. Treatment and discharge via a municipal facility or a POTW is allowed for only for conventional oil and gas production and usually occurs in really limited areas predominantly in the Marcellus region in the northeast. Treatment and discharge via CWT or more centralized industrial treatment facility happens at a handful of facilities again predominantly in the northeast. But that has been recently studied by EPA who identified a number of concerns about the applicability of the program to produce water. And finally there's an important consideration to the no discharge rule where if you're west of the 90th meridian discharges from well sites are allowed if they're a good enough quality for wildlife livestock ag and are put to those uses uses. So the question really becomes here. We define good enough quality or define what the appropriate regulatory program for reuse really looks like and permit writers are left to answer these questions and doing so is is complex. So when we're looking to establish a regulatory or permitting program there are a number of basic questions that we were thinking about when we started to think about how we could use our database to help. What constituents are we concerned about are there approved analytical methods meaning methods that can detect and quantify a constituent and be used in a regulatory environment that's legally enforceable. Are there existing standards we might be able to look at do we have the toxicity information we need to understand what who and at what levels these pollutants might come into contact with them might they cause harm. So EDF has recently updated our database and use the toll to start breaking down some of these challenges. And so this presents at a really high level some of our findings so basically our new database has a little over 1350 produced water constituents. So if you look at the EPA approved analytical methods the kind of methods you need in a regulatory environment. So this is a protection challenge. Not only are there limitations and what's disclosed as being put down whole but we're also dealing with a large number of chemicals that really haven't otherwise been incorporated into programs and needed a method. So less than 25% of these constituents have approved analytical methods. If we want to look at what we have available today in the world of standards we want to we want to first and foremost look okay where can we assess a constituent and know that we have a standard if we wanted to incorporate it into a regulatory program. So right off the bat we lose about coverage for about 1000 potential constituents because we don't have the analytical methods today. So for those that are left are their opportunity. Am I at my time Brenda. Can go for another another minute or so. Great okay. So of those there are about a little over 100 that are already covered in the Clean Water Act. And of those there are about 167 that actually do have comprehensive toxicity data. What I'm moving through here is there are some opportunities to look at standards that we have today that are covered by the constituents are covered. So really quickly I'm just going to put this slide up and I'll move through it to a can if the interest in looking to produce water as a resource really holds it's vital that necessary research and regulatory development is done to ensure that we can write the appropriate protective requirements that don't inadvertently allow for beneficial reuse from our existing freshwater ecosystems while live probably in public health. So more research is really key. And there are some low hanging fruit opportunities like I mentioned where there are standards on the books that we might be able to use if we incorporate them into a permitting program. And we might need to look at where we have toxicity data and could use that to develop new standards or inform more appropriate research and all of this is really to ensure that we're asking the right decisions as society as regulators as researchers, how are we judging the viability of this practice of produce water use. So, you know you often see a question like, see a position that produce water can be treated to meet drinking water standards, but that really only covers about 50 produce water constituents and may not be really the constituents were most worried about, or it might say this meets the oil and gas effluent limitation guideline but that has only one standard increase. So, the end of the answer is really how are we defining good enough quality and are we asking the right questions about produce water to look at this opportunity for reuse. We really want to design these fit for purpose programs that we know are based on an understanding of produce water, knowing what the requirements for your in use are based on those constituents that are concerned and produce water and design a program that meets those targets. And there's just a lot of research that we need to do if we want to get there. So I will wrap up there. Thank you, Nicole. Really interesting to think about produce water reuse and where we need to go with with research and priorities there. I want to invite any board members with with questions we just have a couple of minutes for for questions here to please raise your hand. And while you're thinking of those just to get us going you know if you had to choose a sort of single direction for what you see as the highest research priority from sort of the earth science community to help advance where we need to go in kind of this legal framework to better utilize these these produce waters where would you say that that priority is from the science community. I would say one of the biggest gaps right now is that land application component I really couldn't get to so so really diving into what the hazards are what the exposure pathways are. How might we take what we know and don't know about produce water and think about the proper criteria or guidelines in a land application context a good example in the Clean Water Act context we have the whole affluent toxicity test or the wet test that high throughput comprehensive like the complex mixture and identify at least that there's a toxicity red flag. We don't have a fantastic equivalent for that in the land application context. So, there are some challenges and knowing what are the standards what are we concerned about and produce water if we think about crop uptake soil impacts run off wildlife or livestock consumption. Those are some questions that I think often fall through the cracks because we do focus on the Clean Water Act side. The important if we're going to actually think about using this water in the land arena. Thank you so much, Nicole. All right, in the interest is seen on schedule we're going to move on panelists, board members and audience members as you have questions, you know do do keep them in mind as we'll come back to a full panel discussion after we hear from our, our three speakers so we'll move on here so next we will hear from Rebecca Hernandez, Rebecca is an assistant professor of earth system science and ecology in the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources and co director of the wild energy initiative at the University of California Davis. She directs field based data intensive and technology supported research at the intersection of energy development and the environment. Her work on energy ecology has been featured in the Washington Post National Geographic and PR Forbes and Scientific American, Rebecca we're excited to have you here with us today and forward to your presentation. Thank you so much. I'm just setting up my slide. Duck. There we go. Can you all see that. Yes, looks good. Oh, we lost it. Okay, one more time. Let's see. There we go. Okay, you can see that. Yes. Okay, well, thank you so much to the board on earth sciences and resources for organizing this event. And for your leadership on this topic, I'm just really pleased to be here with you all. So one question that I really enjoy asking my students at UC Davis is how much land. Have you used today. And often I met with confused faces and a few hesitantly raised hands. And I typically follow this up by saying, how many of you have turned on a light, a laptop, or an iPhone. So many of us here today might know that turning on a light, a laptop or any appliance that uses fuel or electricity. That uses land. And in fact, all energy supporting human activities requires land, both directly and indirectly. But how much and to what end. Many of us here know that this is something to be true. So even in geographically large countries, this reality can and is becoming a problem of great ferment. So for example, in the United States, energy development is now the largest driver of land use and land cover change. In the US, an area larger than the size of Texas, about 800,000 kilometers squared is expected to be impacted by energy development and infrastructure by 2040. So the need to account for land and ecosystem impacts for energy becomes more probative amidst a global call by scientists like myself and conservation groups that we need to save half of Earth's ecosystems for nature, and where loss of croplands and under such scenarios are really substantial. So how will we fit everything in. Now in the beginning humans used wood for energy, right from the biosphere, these pre industrial or organic economies they relied on biomass that drove deforestation and required large areas of tree plantations to support small, local energy demands for populations that were much smaller than today. Now the 20th century was noteworthy for three transformations. All generating novel ecological impacts of energy on the on planet Earth, first in the rise of total energy consumption, which is an order of magnitude greater than pre industrial times. Secondly, in the use of hydrocarbons coal oil natural gas for electricity, but last and certainly not least in a greater separation across landscapes from where energy was being generated to where it was being consumed. No longer were we restricted to the distance we could walk to carry firewood. Instead, we could cite energy infrastructure away from our view sheds, often into marginalized minority, as well as indigenous communities, and we could transport that energy as electricity along extensive transmission lines. And this is what I've defined as what's called outsiding. And you can read about that in a study on local energy and front disability. But for the first time impacts of energy on land. They really manifested in these direct indirect and latent modes along these very expensive and intractable supply chains. So in my group, a motivating question for our research is, how will we meet our rapid renewable energy goals, while maintaining our need for conservation and food production. And although we study diverse energy technologies, we often use solar energy as a model energy type to study these relationships because it dwarfs the potential of other renewable energy technologies, including wind and biomass by several orders of magnitude. It's so modular and cosmopolitan, and it's accessibility. My Reena's remap case shows that PV may grow over the next 10 years, reaching a cumulative capacity of approximately 3000 gigawatts by 2030 and almost 9000 gigawatts by 2050. So this is 18 times higher than installed capacity in 2018. So in 2015 we developed the Carnegie Energy Environmental Compatibility Model. This is a satellite based decision support tool. And we use this tool to evaluate how well we are siding ground mounted utility scale solar energy, specifically installations, greater than 20 megawatts. And we focused on the state of California in the United States, which has really been at the vanguard of global development for several decades. Now the map on the left that you can see here, this shows all solar energy installations colored according to their sustainability index and sized by capacity. And we used a three tiered ranking for power plant sites, so compatible, potentially compatible and incompatible. Now if you look at the pie charts. You can see that we found that less than 15% of PV and CSP installations were cited incompatible areas, and many were cited in incompatible areas, owing in large part to extended distances to existing transmission. And some were marked as incompatible because they were cited in areas of endangered and threatened species habitat. So we also explore the siding of these installations by land cover type, and we found that PV power plants are found in 10 land cover types, but the plurality were cited in natural environments. So these are shrub lense and scrub lense. And this is notable because these ecosystems represent here in California, in part, the California floristic biodiversity hotspot. This is a global biodiversity hotspot. Now there exists only a limited number of studies that have assessed the impact of energy on land across all major electricity sources. And to date, all of them have had some methodological limitations or weaknesses. And here in work led by Dr. Jessica Levering, we calculated the land use intensity of energy for real world sites across all major sources of electricity, integrating data from published literature databases, and original digitizing and data calculation. So what we found, we found that ground mounted solar energy, including both concentrating solar power and photovoltaics. This is an order of magnitude lower than than hydro and dedicated biomass, but requires more land than coal, natural gas, residue biomass, wind, geothermal and nuclear. In terms of land use and land cover change, solar energy integrated into pre existing infrastructure. This is our one free pass or free lunch as we could call it. And that requires zero additional land use and land cover change impacts, and our work in our lab is currently focusing on calculating opportunities within the commercial building stocks to serve as recipient environments for solar energy, especially large commercial buildings so our preliminary results have revealed that the 30 largest commercial buildings in the US and body rooftop footprints that average about 275,000 kilometers. Sorry, 275,000 meters squared. And this is an area that is equivalent to approximately 50 American football fields. These are very large buildings. One more thing this is that same data on a log scale. And I want to point out to put dedicated biomass into context, powering an average US city of about 100,000 individuals for one year. They require about 78,000 hectares with dedicated biomass so this is about 145,000 football fields, which might make us all feel a little bit uncomfortable you might, you might remember from Brian slide that that large green bio energy wedge for achieving cumulative savings, and indeed, most global decarbonization pathways now emphasize dedicated biomass, some for which biomass is greater than all of their sources combined. With this data, we can then consider both the environmental impacts from direct emissions, and from land together. And this really confers a more comprehensive comparison of total environmental impacts so that area and circled in red here on your slide. This is the sweet spot, geothermal nuclear solar and wind and that these sources of energy are optimized in terms of their CO2 emissions and impacts on land, but we need to consider other impacts to right, especially those impacting biodiversity and ecosystem services, even cultural services. In California, my work shows that deserts are prioritized, right as recipient environments for solar energy development. So deserts globally, embody these long standing ecological, economic and cultural resources for humans, and especially to indigenous land rights holders. Here, my, my colleague, Dr Steven grotsky and I, we measured the effect of solar energy development decisions on on desert plants at one of the world's largest concentrating solar power plants in Ivan poc California. We found negative effects of solar energy on this desert scrub plant community, specifically we found that perennial plant cover and structure were lower in the bladed treatments which is often what happens with these power plants than in the mode treatments. We determined that cacti species and Mojave yucca are particularly vulnerable to solar energy development that is blading and mowing, whereas shismis, which is an invasive annual grass that often promotes desert fires is facilitated by blading. We're also interested in elucidating impacts of solar energy development decisions in this system on ecosystem services. So here we found the desert scrub plant community confers 188 instances of ecosystem services including carbon sequestration and pollination and cultural services like sense of place and indigenous tools to 18 native American ethnic groups. And we found that bladed and mowing treatments reduced cultural provisioning and regulating ecosystem services of desert plants compared to the undeveloped control. So overall, the study demonstrates the potential for ground mounted solar energy development and deserts to reduce biodiversity and socio ecological services, and emphasizes resources sorry, but it also emphasizes the value of integrating renewable energy infrastructure locally and into the built environment. So moving forward, my colleagues and I have proposed a new model, and one that builds upon the excellent work of Dr. Bokshi at Ohio State University for engineering solar energy systems and renewable energy systems broadly in a way that maximizes both technological and ecological systems. We identified over 15 different types of these installations that can be developed known as Techno ecological synergies of solar solar energy, and this includes installations over land over water, and importantly in cities, even within agricultural areas. And all of these produce about, we found 20 unique beneficial Techno ecological outcomes from these, this type of engineering and design. So examples include the utilization of contaminated land for solar energy generation. These include land related to areas, formerly mined for coal, for example, agrivoltaics rangevoltaics, photovoltaics solar energy coupled with ecosystem restoration and pollinator habitat, Rob Davis with fresh energy is really making huge gains on that opportunity in the US. And our attention in our lab has really turned to these novel applications and quantifying the net technological and ecological outcomes of these opportunities. For example, we're conducting a four site synchronized study of floating solar energy or studying relationships between floating solar and PV performance, biodiversity and hydrology, including water impacts. Thank you so much for your time and attention. I'd like to thank my collaborators and my graduate students and my funders, without which none of this would be realized. Thank you so much Rebecca really fascinating to think about all these connections around land use and ecological change as we imagine this transition towards ramping up renewable so appreciate that and will invite folks to note their questions so that we can come back for our for our full panel discussion after we hear our next and final speaker. So, with that I will go ahead and introduce our last speaker of the panel. Benjamin Holton, Ben is the Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Science and the Cornell University professor in the Department of Ecology and evolutionary biology and of global development. Benjamin Holton is the founding co chair of the California collaborative for climate change solutions, which works with researchers from key research institutions to accelerate the translation of research findings into practical climate solutions. He also directs over 100 acres of farmland carbon sequestration projects to improve crop yields and create new financial markets for farmers and researchers. Fortunately, Ben had an emergency today and is not able to be with us in person however he recorded his talk which we will play now. Garrett Boudinot one of his team members is joined us here today and we'll join for the panel discussion after our break following Ben's presentation, so we will now show his recorded talk. Thank you so much for this opportunity to present to you today I am Ben Holton the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a professor of global development and ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University. Apologies that I can't be there in person. Thank you for joining me, my research associate Dr Garrett Boudinot will be available for the Q&A. I'm going to briefly overview this idea of enhanced weathering, the notion of grinding up rock, applying it to the soil, and having that rock breakdown, so that it creates carbonates that securely lock in, extracting it from the atmosphere into a form that no longer causes dangerous climate interference. There is a lot of discussion today about enhanced weathering as a possible billion ton level solution. That capacity and the gap to the science and deployment is very significant. And so what I want to talk to you today is first the idea of enhanced weathering as a solution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation, including the global capacity for this pathway to operate in agriculture, I will then discuss results from the working lands innovation center that I direct with my colleague Dr Wendy Silver at UC Berkeley, where we are deploying this technology across more than 100 acres of farmland in California and that includes diverse cropping systems and range lands. I will present some preliminary results from the first year of our study in the working lands innovation center, and then we'll talk briefly about issues and opportunities. So taking the big picture perspective, we all know about Earth's Goldilocks and the fact that our planet maintains life because of first its distance from the sun being just right. But on top of the Earth's Goldilocks, and the fact that we have this orientation to the sun, there are incredible feedbacks between atmospheric to and climate that result in stabilization over time so that the Earth doesn't end up in a runaway greenhouse effect, like Venus or get too cold like Mars and rather stays just right. The secret ingredient involves silicate rock weathering reactions, which consume atmospheric CO2, creating bicarbonate in dissolved form that eventually make their way and wash from the land into the ocean, forming calcium carbonate that can securely lock a mole of carbon dioxide from this initial reaction for millions and millions of years. This set of reactions known as the Eurea reactions are faster when uplift exposes fresh rock and the temperature rises. So in other words, gets hotter and CO2 rises, weathering happens more quickly, thereby acting as negative feedback on runaway climate change. The calcium is slower when there is less fresh rock exposed to Earth's surface and as temperature decreases. This allows for natural processes of CO2 ventilation from volcanoes to accumulate CO2 at a level that continues to allow for Earth's temperature to experience a relatively stable condition. The question of today is can this kind of approach, this technology that the planet has invented and been operating for billions of years be accelerated well of course there is potential for accelerating this process. One of the ideas is to take finely crushed rocks that are a byproduct of the mining industry and apply them to cropland soils to greatly accelerate what is normally a relatively slow process over time. The model suggests that anywhere within reason enhanced weathering, if applied this way could get you to two to five billion tons of CO2 removal on Earth croplands. But again, the gap between that capacity and deployment is extremely significant. So just to go through in a cartoon formula what we're talking about here, we take crushed rock that is enriched in calcium and magnesium silicates, we apply it to the soil where there is CO2 that is being pumped up in the soil environment through exploration from microbes and roots, the water from irrigation or precipitation comes in contact with that CO2, and it can form carbonic acid which dissolves the calcium silicate, and that initially forms bicarbonate calcium ions and some silica. We get two moles of CO2 sequestered for this initial reaction sequence. However, if some of the calcium carbonate precipitates back out in the soil, you release one CO2 back to the air meaning only one mole is sequestered. In either scenario, whether we form bicarbonate or carbonate, carbon dioxide is removed and carbonates in the soil have a lifespan of over 77,000 years on average. Of course, that is highly contingent on land use change, but it suggests a very long term carbon sink. In the ocean environment, you're talking about a transport time that can get you millions of years of CO2 removal, so very secure carbon that is not susceptible to biological reactions in the way that organic carbon might be. In the working lands innovation center, we are trying to fill the gap between where the capacity is and where the science needs to go to really understand how this technology operates across diverse cropping systems when carbon dioxide is removed, when it is not so efficiently removed and how we can work with farmers, ranchers and industry partners, government and tribes to understand the full potential in terms of barriers to adoption. In the working lands innovation center we have created an ensemble of different researchers across California working in combination with the US Department of Agriculture and local government agencies, as well as private farmers and UC extension to examine an array of approaches dealing with enhanced weathering. In this approach we are also examining enhanced weathering in combination with organic amendments from compost in this case working with manure repurposing and green waste, as well as biochar, which is being generated from salvage trees that impose a fire risk. Applying these separately in combination along the backbone of the Central Valley all the way into the Imperial Valley along the border of Mexico gives us a bioclimactic envelope that allows us to really understand exactly how this technology works across a range of conditions that includes coastal conditions which are relatively cool and interior conditions which are incredibly hot. We are working across corn, alfalfa, tomato and orchards, as well as managed grazing lands and both in some of our research sites. We are measuring co benefits in this project we believe one of the greatest opportunities for carbon dioxide removal will come when we have what we call carbon capture with benefits that is enhanced yield in our cropping systems, more nutritious food supply and healthier soils as well as things like water holding capacity. So we are measuring all these co benefits in combination with greenhouse gas emissions, including flux towers and measurements and techniques to understand enhanced weathering within the soil. So we have observed some incredibly exciting results in only the first year of this study. This is, these are results from my PhD student at UC Davis Iris Holzer Iris has been examining enhanced weathering and the byproducts of the weathering conditions in lysimeters that are collecting soil water across control metabasol and olivine plus metabasol treatments, and she's finding an approximate doubling of CO2 sequestration in the form of bicarbonate in the soil water. In addition to the surface soils where she is examining lysimeter water in the top six inches she's also looking below the till environment, and it's starting to detect a little bit of evidence that bicarbonate is also forming deeper into the soil just beneath where the weather rock material is is happening in the surface. So really exciting results we're not sure how well these results will hold but I would add that these results are actually happening in a historic drought in California telling us that even under incredibly extreme climates of the future enhanced weathering still has the capacity to more than double CO2 removal again in the form of bicarbonate, which is not vulnerable to things like microbial decay. But this would be approximately one ton of CO2 removal per acre, which is the equivalent with what you might find in an acre of trees planted to remove carbon dioxide. The notable exception here is that this is bicarbonate or inorganic carbon as opposed to organic carbon. In addition, we are finding evidence in the first year of trials for enhanced yield in alfalfa. We are still going through data in corn and other crops, but our alfalfa yields have gone up around 18% across 17 acres. And this is on real farms working with farmers throughout the Central Valley. We need to know if these results will hold. One year of results is not enough to draw any kind of conclusions, but it is compelling to see that yield is enhanced with rock dust. This is consistent with what has been found in relatively small settings in greenhouse environments in the past, and is likely a product of some of the micronutrients that are released from the rock minerals, as well as pH changes, and perhaps even some water holding capacity changes which we are exploring. There are many issues and opportunities in front of us still to understand how enhanced weathering can scale. There is still a heck of a lot of science that needs to take place in terms of understanding predictive analytics of the rate of weathering reactions and the fate of CO2. We are also exploring the life cycle of the material, including mining, including transportation and application, and how that can chew into some of the greenhouse gas benefits. And we are performing some optimization analysis in terms of economics and greenhouse gases in the project, but this is a huge area that needs a lot more attention. Also, there are questions about the amount of rock dust that is available, and there's compelling evidence that there is enough rock dust that has already accumulated over time to get us to billions of tons of CO2 removal on the planet, if deployed on the planet, and a future where slag and concrete manufacturing byproducts, as well as demolition, could be used for enhanced weathering to avoid the need for mining operations. But there are still incredible barriers to adoption, and some of those are price point barriers that our farmers are facing. Currently we estimate that it's anywhere between 60 to $200 per ton of CO2 removed, so still need to get that price point down to something that's more on the order of $100 per ton on CO2. So science to application is a huge part of our project, and I won't get into that now, perhaps in the Q&A this can be discussed, but our theory of change means including suppliers, government, distribution, farmers, science and outreach together in our ecosystem model, of change to really understand the barriers to adoption and how to overcome them as quickly as possible. So our project is by design, one where co-creation involves the application of the amendments in our understanding of where the science needs to meet the real world in terms of what farmers are experiencing and how to bring the price points down. So thank you so much for this brief overview. I look forward to the outcome of the question and answer period, and I hope you have a terrific panel discussion. All right. Thank you, Ben, for that great presentation and for recording it for us today. We'll miss having him on the panel, but look forward to a conversation with everybody after a quick break. I just want to thank Nicole and Rebecca and Ben for their excellent presentations and for being here with us today. We will take a not quite a 15 minute break now and come back at five past the hour for our panel discussion. So please rejoin us at 205 Eastern Time and please come with your questions for all of our panelists and we'll look forward to a great discussion. Thank you. Welcome back, everybody. We hope you were able to join us for our presentations earlier today by Nicole Saunders, Rebecca Hernandez and Ben Holton. Nicole and Rebecca will now come back for a panel discussion and will be joined by Garrett Boudinot, a research associate with Cornell's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, who works on the enhanced engineering project with Ben Garrett and also works with Ben. Garrett also works as a community science fellow with AGUs Thriving Earth Exchange and serves as a science advisor at Climate Music. Garrett, thank you for jumping in to join our panel. Appreciate your participation today. So for those of you joining us in the audience, please feel free to put your questions into the Q&A box and at the bottom of the screen, and we will intersperse those questions with questions from our Beezer board members. And so to start off, I'm really excited to be able to have this discussion today at this intersection of water, land, subsurface, rock processes, and think about how we're sort of communicating across these different disciplines as we work towards this energy transition. And so I'm interested in hearing from our speakers today about what you see that's working in creating the space for these really sort of interdisciplinary conversations where we're talking about things in rock, subsurface, weathering to land and environmental justice to water and where you see sort of the strengths in creating the opportunities for these sort of cross sector interdisciplinary conversations and where we're doing where those conversations are happening. And I guess Rebecca maybe can we can I direct that one to you. Sure. Yeah, I think that that, you know, basically what you're asking is where, you know, where's this going to be developed most effectively and I think that that is at the really where where lots of different groups come together. And the one thing I've noticed in my research is that it takes an entire knowledge system to really shed light on all of the outcomes of a particular technology, both the positive ones and the negative ones. You know, making sure when you are working on a technology that you're incorporating the voices, the data from all of the groups involved spanning multiple sectors. You know, not non governmental groups, government, industry, academia, I feel like that's really, that's really where a lot of innovation can happen, especially when thinking about how to produce beneficial outcomes that outweigh the negative outcomes. Great. Thank you, Rebecca. Nicole or Garrett, would either of you like to answer this question or we can, we can go on to one of the questions from our, from our board. Yeah, I think this is Nicole, I can chime in quickly and just, I liked the idea that you brought in the interdisciplinarian approaches to some of these challenges. And one thing with the produce water in the oil and gas context is that we're only just now starting to see experts and entities and policymakers that are not traditionally involved with oil and gas decision making and oil and gas research chiming in on this challenge of looking to produce water and what the risks and opportunities are for its reuse so things, everyone from the impact of communities and end users outside of the oil and gas context to traditional water reuse experts that are bringing a different perspective and needed nuance and new thinking to this challenging raising what questions need to be asked and answered to ensure that if that moves forward it does so in a way that doesn't increase risk. Great. Thank you, Nicole. I would like to invite Elizabeth I asked a question. Thanks a lot Brenda. Hello everyone and my compliments to all all three panelists really great talks. I have a question actually. I'm Nicole Nicole it's nice to see you again. Just in connection with, you talked a bit about the fit for purpose aspect of the produce water, and there's a degree of societal acceptance for some of the different applications right, and I know the chemistry and exposure pathways and so forth of the different types of water are a big issue and still need a lot of a lot of research in certain cases, certain parts of the country, but I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the volume challenge because there's a for any given purpose. I'm sure a consistent supply of the water and then a lot of places that that's been intermittent and particularly with this last year where the the industry has had some swings, if you will, I wondered if you could talk a little bit about the quantity issue and and how it ties to the quality challenges there. That's a great question Elizabeth hi nice to see you as well and thank you for the question. I think there are some really great experts I would first say on the quantity specifics a point directly to maybe Bridget Scanlon at Bureau of Economic Geology sees published a lot of really fantastic interesting research on this front. But generally speaking I think you raise an important point that is that when you look at the reuse of a potential resource, how reliable is it. How consistent is it are we going to have seasonal complications when we look at it does it vary and so all of those basic infrastructure and issues are really are important when you think about produce water and the volume is a challenge Bridget studies out of the be she's found that even if you were to put a large volume of this produce water to certain use in a certain region it's really not going to quench the thirst maybe of those uses like an agricultural context and so there's a challenge there and realistically thinking about from a volume perspective and the cost of treatment and the cost of basically getting everything from one place to another we all know that moving water period is very cost intensive. So thinking about that fit for purpose issue of in this place at this time is there an opportunity and perhaps the best and highest use of that water is to use it in oil and gas operations stop using fresh water, and look for reliable disposal alternatives and allow the fresh water to be used in those regions for those other purposes. And there may be some instances where it's worth the treatment to think about but it's going to be not a national application it's definitely going to be heavily regional if not very localized I think because of that volume challenge and transportation and getting it where you need it. Great thank you so much nickel. And I'll invite Jim to ask a question. Jim sluse. Oh, we can't hear you Jim. How about now. Yep. Okay, sorry about that. This is for Rebecca and it's really in the what's the two part are in looking at land use and different energy sources. The first is, is more on whether you've looked at I found it intriguing I know that you're looking at very large scale solar. If you look you mentioned the free lunch being if you put it on an existing building. One of the things and this is because of personal experience you come in go to put like residential solar there's a disincentive of over sizing your solar because of the way the net metering works, and it would seem that if you could fix that I don't know if you've analyzed any of that but if you could fix that disincentive so you would maximize the solar on on an individual roof that that would have a collective benefit. And anyway so that's part one the other is looking at different I in your in one of your slides you showed land impact versus CO2 or ecological impact. And, and so because the CO2 impact things like natural gas go went out quite a far on the right on that. But have you have you also looked at modeling what would what if you were doing some level of CC us with natural gas. Have you looked at where that would fall on the continuum since most, most energy analysis is hey we're going to need some component of at least of natural gas in the future in fact some models say we'd actually in the near term have to increase natural gas use to meet energy needs. Great question. Thank you, Jim. To your first question on incentives. I have to say, there are a couple other experts who are making a lot quicker faster, better strides on that on that particular topic. So, I think that's where Ryan at the Center for biological diversity put out a really good report quantifying different incentives for low footprint renewables solar energy in the US and I think that really it's it's clear that the the incentives that we have in are not matched to facilitate low footprint, low carbon energy development in the US. And this is this is problematic when we think about the fact that land use and land cover change is something that facilitates greenhouse gas emissions. And it, it, it also reduces habitat for wildlife so you know what I like to tell folks is that, you know, one of the most impactful things you can do as an individual is to put solar on your rooftop or on your commercial building, because not only are you reducing emissions associated with just the lower CO2 emissions associated with that technology compared to fossil fuels. You're also reducing emissions associated with the land use and land cover change that would have otherwise occurred if that renewable energy infrastructure was developed in a say natural area. So, you know, this is this is complicated and the, the, like I said, the policies surrounding this understanding in the US today are not are not well suited to to engender an outcome for a low footprint transition. And I think it's something that we really need to acknowledge and, and make sure that we're understanding the consequences of that down down down the road. Thank you Rebecca. I'm going to jump in with a couple of questions from our attendees who had had several sort of details specific questions for Garrett about the enhanced rock weathering experiments and so there were there are a number of them that I'll sort of go through here thinking about how does this change the local pH of the soil environment and does that then change the nutrients of the produced crops. And could that perhaps be a benefit for some biospecies that are that are being being farmed and things like that so those are for the first set of questions around around how it changes the pH and perhaps there are there are crops that could benefit from some of these these enhanced weathering reactions. So thanks for for bringing those up Brenda I saw those questions in the Q&A and was really excited to see those to have a chance to get in the weeds on how enhanced weathering works. And I think those questions are spot on and to provide a little bit more detail of the chemistry behind enhanced weathering. It's actually based on a change in soil pH. And so as those magnesium and calcium rich silicate rocks dissolve, they're releasing those positively charged magnesium or calcium ions. What that does is that shifts the charge balance of the soil for waters changes the way that hydrogen specie aids and ultimately it increases the pH so that one one question hit the nail on the head it does increase the pH of the soil. And from an agronomic perspective that's actually really advantageous so a lot of the world soils are actually over acidic. And when soils are very acidic, it means that nutrients are more likely to leach away from the soils, and it increases the bioavailability of toxic metals. And so any strategy that we can use to increase the pH of soils actually has a number of benefits for overall agronomy, including improved nutrient retention. And so there's a number of soils, particularly in the tropical regions of the of the planet where soil productivity is limited because of the acidity. And so if we could deploy enhanced weathering in some of those areas, we would have incredible benefits for soil health, and thus human health, human nutrition, as well as mitigating global climate change. And farmers already use one practice that's very similar to enhanced weathering to increase the pH and that's called liming. They add calcium carbonate to soils to do that same thing increase the pH. Unfortunately, when it's a calcium carbonate, that process releases CO2. So when we replace that with a calcium silicate, it reverses the the direction of carbon speciation and encourages that bicarbonate production that draws down CO2. So that was a great question. And hopefully, Brenda, did that answer the big one there. Yeah, there's a couple more details I'll follow up with here there was a question about will has coal ash been tried as a potential source for that and do does this perhaps change calcification in the soil over time you know this this change in pH and these changed reactions. I have a couple more questions and kind of gets the front end and the back end of enhanced weathering so I yeah I saw the coal ash question I also saw someone asked about potentially using mine tailings as a source and and those are spot on so actually a lot of the rock dust that we're already using and in this field are byproducts of mining that are already ground to a really good particle size for this process, and they have that ideal chemistry. And you know thinking about how can we address resource priorities and mitigate climate change while also reducing adverse environmental impacts kind of the goal of this panel. Enhanced weathering is at the intersection of all of those goals because the the global mining industry produces an enormous amount of waste that we're finding has the ideal chemistry to be deployed, not only to minimize environmental quality, but actually have positive impacts on the global climate so absolutely there are other industrial waste products coal ash cement kiln dust things that also have calcium magnesium and an ideal chemistry for enhanced weathering. So what's important with a lot of these materials is that we not only think of what's the calcium and magnesium those those positively charged ions that drive enhanced weathering, but also what's the concentration of potentially harmful trace elements trace metals in the literature you'll see some really high estimates of how much carbon dioxide enhanced weathering can bring down and then you'll see the material they chose was something that also has high levels of chromium and nickel and things that we really wouldn't want in our global agricultural soils. And so this goes into I mean life cycle analysis has been used a number of times today, this definitely goes into that life cycle assessment of enhanced weathering of what are the costs. In terms of the availability of materials and their potential negative impacts on soils, but then what are the benefits that we could have for the climate, and when we know that there are plenty of materials available that don't have those negative impacts from chromium and nickel and other heavy metals, but can provide the ideal chemistry for enhanced weathering just put numbers on it if that helps. So some studies have suggested that globally we need somewhere around 10 to 30 billion tons of rock material for global enhanced weathering. There's over 40 billion tons of existing mine tailings, just from metal and ore in the US alone. So the US has tons of material just sitting around waiting to be used for a process like this. And again, it could have a lot of benefits. Briefly I'll mention the calcification, because that that can be confusing been talked about bicarbonate, then going to carbonate. What we're finding is that in a lot of soils, the majority of carbon, or the majority of the fate of carbon from enhanced weathering is actually bicarbonate. And the overall fate of that is to the oceans, where in the oceans it might either buffer ocean acidification, another really important climate benefit of enhanced weathering, or precipitate eventually into calcium carbonate. So certainly it can happen in soils and it depends on the soil physical structure soil pH and climate, but we're not seeing negative impacts from soil calcification. And again, primarily we're seeing bicarbonate, even having further positive climate impacts in the ocean. Thank you. Yeah, let's go to your question. Okay, thanks. So my questions for Nicole, and Nicole I'm based in New Mexico. So of course produced water is something I think about a lot. And I really enjoyed your talk and one of the things that kind of caught my attention that I hadn't really thought about before is when you mentioned the geochemical variability in composition of produced water regionally across the United States. And it made me realize that I probably need to start thinking about in New Mexico whether Permian basin produced water is geochemically different than San Juan basin. So I'm curious just to delve into that a little bit more. And the questions I had are, I'm assuming that depending on the unit that the produce water is coming from even within one region you may get variability and produced water. And I'm curious about how the regional variability across the US say would vary compared to the geochemical variation and produce water within, say New Mexico. And then also, it's kind of a big question if you could just point me in the direction of a place where I could discover some of that for myself that would be great. So the first thing is that I, one of the scientists on staff that actually was the author of one of our publications her name is Dr. Coel Danforth. We have partnered with a couple of different researchers and there is, there is there's probably some research that's really interesting to you that would have been done on DJ basin water in Colorado. But their findings could raise some questions that may be something that you'd want to look at on New Mexico waters generally. And I will get you those paper citations if you want to shoot me an email I'm happy to actually send you the links to those, rather than name them off the top of my head on a panel today I'm not that good. And the second question I think you're, it's really spot on and you know it's hard to say we haven't done a comprehensive comparison there are definitely some generalizations you can make for example about the total dissolved solids that you might see from region to region. But I think that you will see even within New Mexico the San Juan versus the Permian and even within the Permian, the Delaware versus the Midland sub basins having very different produced waters that will impact what we're targeting from a treatment system and what we're looking for in our regulatory system and that's really challenging it because there's just not a lot of comprehensive, you know, using research advanced research methods more than just GCMS more advanced non targeted analysis to characterize those waters. There's not a ton of that done on New Mexico water same goes in in Texas where we're also thinking about these questions where I am. So you do want to look region to region and then we've also there are also some really interesting studies that look over the lifespan of a well alone so even if you take the geographical or geological considerations out of the picture and look at time. And from day one where you've completed a well obviously you're getting flow back and more fluids that you're using in chemicals you're using in that initial fracturing operation. But beyond that when you look 3060 300 900 days, you do see some very interesting and impactful variation so when we talk about reusing produced water in any given context. You know there's a lot of generalization about that term but we really need to understand what specifically are we talking are we talking about day 30 produced water are we talking about day 600 maybe the TDS changes maybe trace organics change in a really important way maybe a certain well has been up you know they might have done maintenance on a well they might have done some kind of operation on a well that what was utilized in that process. There could come back and show up in that produce water and if there's not a lot of conversation at the front end that we're expecting that or we're knowing we're going to see it we may not be prepared for that in the treatment. So there's a lot of different things to consider back when it comes to the variability component when when you think about developing reuse programs and please don't forget to email me I'm happy to make sure I get you whatever papers I know about. Great thanks a lot I really appreciate your comments. Sure. Thank you Nailia and Nicole. Here's another question from our from our participants for for Garrett. So what are sort of the sightings so mine sites are often not around agricultural fields so what are the transportation limits to truck the crush rock to the agricultural land. Does it have to be sort of large scale enough to see those significant impacts of carbon sequestration and how does transportation link into that. Great question. There are a surprisingly large number of existing mine operations that do have a lot of the ideal chemistry for enhanced weathering across the country and across the globe. So we're not thinking about having to ship things across the country to reach the ideal farm candidates, although certainly shipping is something that needs to be done and needs to be optimized and commercially viable. And, you know, when you mentioned the scale of the farm or the size of the farm if that matters one of the things we're really excited about with enhanced resin enhanced weathering is its ability to scale to all farm sizes so this isn't something that only large farm operations would be able to take advantage of. If you've got the equipment to apply fertilizer or a line to your to your croplands, you can take advantage of enhanced weathering, get those agronomic and carbon benefits, but been alluded to this whole process a little bit. And you mentioned the costs as something that needs to be optimized is currently a barrier. And so for a long, and it gets to this question that's certainly the costs of transporting the materials acquiring and transporting the materials do need to be offset by the costs of the farm units that the farmers might get. So we're really excited about enhanced weathering and other carbon sequestration and cropland options as a way to increase the economic viability of America's agricultural sector, but the economic benefits from carbon need to match the necessary inputs that farmers need both on the acquiring materials and the management and verification side of things. And so, there are certainly ways that we can get farms of all sizes wherever they are the material. The question is, does the do the costs match the benefits or do the benefits outweigh the costs. And I think there's also some creative. Brian was talking about this, you know, market and policy changes that need to happen. I know that cooperatives are things that farmers use currently just small farm operations used to stay economically viable with these large farm operations. And we're envisioning how farmers could have carbon cooperation so that they could cost share some of the needed inputs or acquire enough of these materials that need to be shipped to get elsewhere. And the last thing I'll say is been talking a lot about economic costs there are of course carbon costs with transporting. And so, wherever these materials come from and go to we need to make sure that the emissions from that transportation are lower than the carbon that we're sequestering some existing models suggest that for many regions we could easily get to a place where we're emitting 10 to 30% of the carbon we're sequestering. So we're still sequestering a large, you know, the cost benefit that still says this is a huge carbon benefit. And we're in the early stages of developing enhanced weathering and so I'm optimistic that as again we look at those new, those other industrial materials and ways to safely use those optimize the ways that farmers can form cooperatives and share production and stock pile a lot of these materials, so that they could use rail instead of roads for example, these are all creative ways that the market can move so that we can address this issue of getting the materials to the farmers safely and effectively. Great, thank you. Michael, I'll invite you to ask a question. Thank you to all the presenters that have so many great questions, so many questions based on your presentations but maybe to start with Garrett. Is there a limit to how much rock you can put on a unit of land before you accumulate too much other byproduct, for example clay or silica. The studies at the field scale are rather limited so the working lands innovation center is really currently the largest field deploy trial system in the world, and we're we're still in our early phases, but some existing trials in the mesocosm or pop scale can shine some light on this. We're seeing that there is an upper limit to how much rock material can be applied to soils before the soil becomes so basic or the pH increases so high that you're no longer effectively dissolving the material. It turns out though that the amount of rock dust that would be needed to generate that high of pH is pretty exorbitant. It's upwards of 50 tons per acre really high. What we apply is generally about 20 tons per acre, but we're going to be trying with up to 40 tons per acre so all of this is to say that is an open question and when Ben says there's still a large gap between theory and deployment that optimized amount of maximizing agronomic and carbon benefits with respect to the amount of rock that we apply that's at the forefront of the research we're doing. Brenda can I ask the second question. Yeah, go ahead. I'm from Nicole. I was really struck when you showed the map of where produce waters are coming from where waters are being produced and where studies of what to do with that produce water been undertaken. And it seemed like there was a great correlation between how dry a setting was and whether people have been exploring using produced waters. The reason why California and Texas have not been exploring have not undertaken as many studies about produce waters. Is there an expectation that production will decrease over time. No, I you know I think one point to make is that the that studies of produce water specifically that did advanced chemical characterization of produce water so that's not to say that there haven't been different types of studies on produce water maybe for oil filled purposes or other places. The first and foremost is the first thing I think I want to say in response to that. The other is that economics is a major driver in this concern this issue so in Texas for example, produce water is predominantly probably more than 90% it's hard to know the exact amounts right now, re injected. Some of that is for just re injection for disposal some of that is also technically a form of reuse through re injection for enhanced oil recovery so a large volume nationally about 45% I think was the last statistics I saw. This water is re injected for enhanced oil recovery so in that sense it is reused in some places. The other thing to know with Texas is that disposal wells are widely available and a low cost alternative for underground and ejection and management of this way stream and from the perspective of a scientifically environmental group that worries a lot about public health and exposure risk, and where those walls are constructed adequately at the moment, they do reduce exposure risk from the management of a really really complex often toxic waste stream and so when we think about moving outside of the communities there's both an economic consideration of the amount of treatment that you would need to do to treat this water to meet a standard that really has not yet to be really comprehensively set to address what we're concerned about and produce water. That number, just at a basic economic needs needs to be competitive with what your alternative is, and then also your risk management decision so in Texas for example I think we're just now starting to see that really ramp up there's a look at treatment of produce water for alternative options that we're going to answer some of these hard questions, but we haven't seen that yet just basically from an economic standpoint. In California unless familiar comprehensively with what they've done across the state there are there is a small region of California where produce water from steam filled operations that are not hydraulically fractured in the current river valley are used in the irrigation system for crops including food crops in that valley. There is a food safety panel that is doing an ongoing study of the safety of that practice in looking at comprehensive characterization of the water itself that's being used and analysis of the fruit and other issues and to look at public health impacts from consuming foods that are partnered with produce waters that's a very, very specific kind of a niche area where that's happening it's not happening anywhere else in the country. And that's due to a number of different factors but there's a lot of interesting research on that with the food if you think if you research the food safety panel and the California. Coelho irrigation water district those things would come up and you would see what's going on in California there. Thank you Michael will go to a couple of questions for for Rebecca next. One question from the from the audience was about the impact for increased solar on heat island effects urban heat island effects and what we see in that area. I think you're still muted. You're not able to unmute Eric, can you help Rebecca unmute. Oh, a crash. That's no good. Amelia. Yeah I had a question for Rebecca but because she's crashed I have a question for Garrett. Garrett, I'm curious a little kind of a follow up on what Michael asked. You add rock dust to agricultural fields. And it, I think most, you may not be able to answer this because it looked like the time scales that of the experiment so far we're pretty short but what I'm curious is, what is the time scale you know you add X amount of rock 20 tons per acre camera what number you said but and for how long does that geochemical reaction continue to completion. What's what's the timeframe. Great question and yeah unfortunately because this is a relatively new technology and new idea we're still figuring that out. So we're thinking this is an annual application and so this is something that farmers can apply every year. It's what we're doing in our trials, and it depends on the material, or the, the long term fate and efficacy each year of enhanced weathering material, the grain size I saw there was a question in the Q&A of what's the ideal particle size material. All of these things are very much still being optimized. And so, ultimately, we want to increase the amount of dissolution that happens so the more of these particles that you fully dissolve, then the more each year it's effective. So that is a function of temperature precipitation. And so we imagine that the best mineral to be to use for our trials in the Palma Valley in California are going to be in the rate and practice there. It's going to be very different from the optimized practice that we have here in Ithaca New York. But that's a great question. It's something that we're still optimizing that we are relatively competent that doing this each year for for many years. Again, depending on this pH of the soil and the climate, this can generate the same agronomic and climate benefits. Okay, I think we have Rebecca back. Yes. Yes, thank you. I had to shut down my zoom it would not let me do anything. Thank you. The, the, the, well, I think I actually missed one of Jim's question. He was asking about assessing the footprint come by of CCS with natural gas, and to answer his question. No, our group has not done that analysis. It would be really neat to see to go from, you know, production and capture and transportation to injection and quantify the land footprint of that. My guess is that a lot of that perhaps would be comprised of footprint associated with with pipelines as that's typically the case for, you know, the footprint of a natural gas power plant as a whole. So the group would definitely be poised to answer that question and certainly we're looking at other kind of gaps in the literature on footprint associated with energy infrastructure like geothermal energy storage. Those are two areas that need a lot more constraining in terms of the data that we have. And then the other question was on, oh, land surface temperatures or air temperatures and there is, there's, that's another really important gap, I would say in the literature that needs to be closed. There's consensus to date that air temperature increases within solar parks, particularly when you have ground mounted installations in, say, hot semi-arid climates. So we're looking at about three to four degrees increase in air temperature in a hot semi-arid environment and maybe two to five degrees in say a cold desert environment. In an urban area, there's increasing consensus, I would say that that deployment in urban areas actually can serve to reduce the urban heat island effect, which is another one of these techno ecological outcomes that can really provide, you know, great benefits, not only just with that, but something that is really important too for parking lots that can provide a lot of important services to people in their cars when they get off of work or something. And so there's a lot of work that needs to be done. One study that we're working on now is exploring not only how solar energy development and arid lands impacts within surface temperatures within the actual park, but beyond that. So what we're seeing is that there is a presence of a cool island that occurs beyond the boundary of a ground mounted installation up to 730 meters, so about 750 meters away from the solar park boundary. And so this is all sort of an area of active research and a really important consideration and you think about all of the environmental cues that can be impacted from those changes in both air temperature and land surface temperatures. And I'll ask a follow up question for you, Rebecca, we're interested in your comment on how energy infrastructure might impact and changing energy infrastructure might impact marginalized and indigenous communities and wondered if you could say a bit more about, you know, how things like expanding renewable solar panel arrays might impact communities in either a positive or negative way. Yeah, sure. I think one of the, the most unfortunate side effects of renewable energy expansion and perhaps one that we don't often think about is that we don't really like to see our renewable energy infrastructure. It's very industrial looking, and we're finding that, you know, a lot of people, communities don't want to see it in their view sheds. And so the, the, the, what happens is, is that a lot of times, our energy infrastructure gets what what we call outside it, they get installed into areas