Blog Posts
Part of ARPA-E’s mission is to overcome long-term and high-risk technological barriers in the development of energy technologies that reduce imports, improve efficiency, and reduce emissions. The Rebellion Photonics and University of Notre Dame projects focus on the latter piece of the mission, working to turn emissions reduction ideas into reality.
Blog Posts
ARPA-E recently released a funding opportunity, Systems for Monitoring and Analytics for Renewable Transportation Fuels from Agricultural Resources and Management (SMARTFARM), to develop innovative new technologies for measuring emissions from agricultural feedstock production. We sat down with Dr. David Babson, SMARTFARM’s Program Director, to learn about his vision and the technologies of interest for Phase 2 of the program.
Blog Posts
Recently, we had an opportunity to sit down with Dr. Jack Lewnard, program director for ARPA‑E REcyle Underutilized Solids to Energy (REUSE) program to discuss the transformation from plastic and paper trash to energy treasure.
Blog Posts
We’re excited to announce a new partnership with DoD’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) to further demonstrate and validate ARPA-E derived technologies at DoD installations across the country. ESTCP targets DoD’s urgent environmental and installation energy needs to improve Defense readiness, resilience and costs. Projects under this partnership will conduct demonstrations to validate the performance and operational costs of promising ARPA-E technologies and provide valuable data needed for end-user acceptance and to accelerate the transition of these technologies to commercial use.
Blog Posts
We recently sat down with Dr. Babson to discuss how he became interested in energy, his journey serving in various roles across the federal government, and the future of bioenergy and agricultural systems.
Blog Posts
We sat down with ARPA-E Program Director, Dr. Rachel Slaybaugh, as she reflected on her experience attending the very first ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit Student Program back in 2010.
Slick Sheet: Project
Lithios will develop a disruptive new technology using electrochemistry to separate lithium from difficult feedstocks with unprecedented selectivity. By replacing expensive chemicals, acids, and bases with voltage-tunable electrons, Lithios’ Advanced Lithium Extraction technique can achieve dramatic reductions in energy use, carbon emissions, and water consumption. This project promises to unlock domestic lithium from low-grade brines and waste battery resources with unparalleled efficiency to enhance the economic and energy security of the U.S.
Slick Sheet: Project
Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) is developing an electrochemical reactor that responds quickly to dynamic changes in renewable energy to work with direct air capture systems. The team’s bipolar membrane electrolysis reactor will overcome the common challenges faced by the current state of technology. For example, existing micro-channel bipolar membrane reactors operate at high overpotentials, leading to inefficient energy use. Georgia Tech will integrate activating layers to improve energy efficiency.
Slick Sheet: Project
Northeastern University is pioneering new technology to convert dilute carbon dioxide into a concentrated ethanol product using intermittent renewable electricity. Most electrochemical technologies require higher than 95% pure carbon dioxide to create ethanol. Northeastern’s approach uses carbon dioxide in concentrations similar to air (400 parts per million). The approach doesn’t require thermal steps in the procedure, making it easy to turn on and off the process according to when renewable energy is available.
Slick Sheet: Project
University of Arizona is conducting a large-scale herbarium x-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning project, with more than 100,000 scans to discover new metal-harvesting hyperaccumulating plants in the U.S. Using a portable XRF spectrometer, this project will improve the accuracy of elemental analysis and provide critical insight into the potential of native U.S. flora for phytomining.