(from left to right) MLEF interns Stephanie Huang, Brendan Hughes, and Jessee Steele.
This summer, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Workforce Development & Education hosted three recipients of the Mickey Leland Energy Fellowship (MLEF). These interns were sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and pursued a 10-week summer internship program in Berkeley Lab’s Energy Geosciences Division. On August 19 and 20, they presented their findings to their colleagues through a two-day virtual event.
Stephanie Huang, a post baccalaureate student at Johns Hopkins University, worked with Dr. Heng Deng. Huang has just finished a masters in Geography and Environmental Engineering. Like Steele, she also looked at enhanced weathering research and focused on its potential as negative emissions technology. Huang created a 1D reactive transport model with equations that describe geochemical reactions. Her simulation showed that, in the presence of acetate and oxalate, there is a slight increase in forsterite dissolution and magnesite precipitation. Huang concluded that theoretically, there is a potential of enhanced weathering as a negative emissions technology.
Brendan Hughes, a post baccalaureate student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, worked with Dr. Michael Commer. With a background in structural geology, Hughes is interested in studying carbon dioxide emissions. His project focused on geologic carbon sequestration methods. His team’s test site was located in Alberta, Canada. Using data from this site, Hughes produced forward and inversion models to produce well logs to understand subsurface parameters.
Jessee Steele, sophomore in Environmental Sciences at Duke University, worked with Dr. Bhavna Arora. He’s interested in biogeochemistry and designing ecologically sustainable systems. Steele’s project focused on understanding the effects of enhanced weathering on carbon sequestration outcomes. To learn more, he and his mentor conduct a systematic literature review. Among their results, they found that the highest carbon sequestration potential was found in plots planted with soybean and alfalfa. They also discovered that there was little consistent protocol for carbon sequestration standards.
–Ingrid Ockert, Marketing Communications Coordinator
