Bielicki receives $544,219 NSF grant to study CO2 use in geothermal energy production and storage

Professor Jeffrey Bielicki, who holds a joint appointment with the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering and the John Glenn School of Public Affairs at The Ohio State University, has received $544,219 of a $1.9 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Sustainable Energy Pathways (NSF SEP) program to investigate innovative ways to use carbon dioxide for geothermal energy production and storage.

“Facilities that generate electricity from geothermal resources typically use hot water from deep underground.  But using carbon dioxide instead of water has a number of benefits; it can extract heat more effectively, expand the locations where geothermal energy production is economically viable, and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being emitted to the atmosphere,” said Bielicki. “This research will help enable the transition of our energy systems to those that are more environmentally benign, cost effective, and socially acceptable. It will lead to innovations to expand the amount of electricity generated by renewable resources and reduce the pace of climate change.”

Bielicki is working with colleagues at the University of Minnesota, who will use the other portion of the NSF SEP grant. He also conducts research in this area with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the use of supplemental fluids, including carbon dioxide and nitrogen, for geothermal energy production and storage. That research focuses on novel arrangements of how to mine geothermal heat and on how to use geothermal resources to store energy and enable more integration of wind and solar technologies into the electrical grid.


Written by Hank Wilson