This grant is supports the core operations of an emerging interdisciplinary energy research hub in the Environmental Markets Lab, also known as emLab, based in the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). This grant will help to advance emLab’s core activities in both project management and research capacities. Part of the funding will go towards hiring a new energy and climate project manager and helping existing staff to refresh and formalize emLab’s suite of project management tools. Lessons learned from implementing these project management activities will be disseminated throughout the research community. Funding will also support two emLab research projects on energy and distributional equity and is being conducted in partnership with the California Air Resources Board (CARB). The first research project focuses on the unequal distribution of energy burdens in California. The intention is to assess differences among household energy expenditures along socio-demographic dimensions. The second project takes a broader, national view and explores the equity implications of electricity sector decarbonization. It will do so by identifying and analyzing regional pollution concentrations due to different forms of electricity production. Researchers will then assess differences in emissions and pollution associated with a range of alternative energy system decarbonization policies. Each research project is expected to result in at least one publication.

This funding supports the administration of a series of small grants emerging from a new Scialog conference series, conducted in partnership with the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA). Scialog conferences bring together early-career faculty from different disciplines to develop cutting-edge ideas for research projects that have the potential to grow and expand over time, with discussions guided by senior subject matter experts. This conference series is titled Sustainable Minerals, Metals, and Materials (SM3), and will address issues such as the role of critical minerals and metals in the clean energy transition, synthetic material production, waste disposal and recycling, and life-cycle analysis. The SM3 Scialog series is expected to run for three years, with meetings planned for 2024-2026, and will involve collaboration with other funders as well. At each Scialog conference, participants form collaborative teams and prepare brief proposals for seed grant funding, which are subsequently reviewed by senior researchers and a handful selected for support. This grant will support 10 awards to SM3 Scialog Fellows resulting from the 2024 conference, with each Fellow receiving $66,000 to support their project.

Global factors play a major role in influencing which decarbonization policies are considered by US policymakers and how those policies are implemented. The last few years have seen a host of issues emerge on this front: the push for greater economic protectionism, wars and conflicts that have destabilized energy markets, and the growing recognition that the impacts from climate change will impact economic growth patterns for decades to come. These matters are highly timely and relevant for contemporary energy policymaking in the United States, and have spurred discussion, for example, of establishing a carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) that would tax carbon-intensive goods entering the country or exploring how recent turbulence in oil and gas markets might influence investment in clean energy technologies. Funds from this grant support efforts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) to advance research on the interplay between energy system decarbonization, international trade, and macroeconomics. NBER will hold two open calls for papers on these topics: one in 2024 on energy and trade, and one in 2025 on energy and macroeconomics. Eight research papers are expected to be supported per call, for a total of sixteen. In addition to the calls, grant funds will support two conferences for each call, a pre-conference to share initial ideas, methodologies, and research design, and a second conference to share results and findings with scholars and policymakers. Participating faculty will be asked to nominate graduate students to participate in the conferences, as a way to more closely connect these early-career researchers with NBER.

Sustainable hydrogen has emerged in recent years as a promising contributor in clean energy transitions for its potential to help decarbonize multiple sectors. Scholars are increasingly envisioning numerous uses for cleanly-produced hydrogen, including industrial heat, energy storage, or grid-balancing demand response. Recent work, however, has indicated that hydrogen might itself be an indirect greenhouse gas, with hydrogen emissions potentially increasing warming and therefore offsetting its expected climate benefits. As we begin a national build out of clean hydrogen infrastructure, it is vital to understand potential sources and magnitudes of hydrogen emissions along the supply chain so we can prepare for and address these issues at the outset, instead of having to mitigating these impacts through retrofits down the line. This grant funds the preliminary stages of a major research project by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) to conduct a multi-sector, collaborative hydrogen emissions field measurement campaign to better quantify hydrogen emissions across the full hydrogen value chain. Led by Ramón Alvarez, Associate Chief Scientist at EDF, and working closely with partners at West Virginia University and Transport Energy Strategies, EDF will collect hydrogen emissions data from real-world hydrogen fueling stations, including both gaseous and liquid fueling infrastructure, and vehicles, focusing primarily on heavy-duty vehicles like trucks, buses, and forklifts. The team will deploy two new measurement devices, a hydrogen full-flow sampling system, to be used for hydrogen emissions measurement at fueling stations, and the hydrogen portable emissions measurement system, to be used for vehicle emissions testing. These measurement devices will integrate a fine-resolution hydrogen sensor that will allow the project team to measure hydrogen emissions at concentrations that are too low to be a safety concern—and thus are below the measurement threshold of existing sensors—but that, collectively, might aggregate to have climate impacts. The team will use their results to develop some of the first estimates of hydrogen emissions in the transportation sector. In addition to publishing their findings in scholarly journals, EDF will release a publicly available hydrogen emission inventory, which will include the team’s field campaign results and will continue to be expanded as EDF’s larger hydrogen campaign progresses and expands.