This grant provides two years of support for the continued production and improvement of the Columbia Energy Exchange podcast series, produced by Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP). Launched in 2015 and hosted by veteran energy journalist Bill Loveless, the 30-minute, weekly podcast features in-depth, one-on-one discussions with top thought leaders in the energy sector. The podcast series has featured an impressive network of leaders from across the energy system, including former government agency heads from the United States and abroad, CEOs of energy companies involved in a wide range of industries (oil, gas, electricity, nuclear, and renewables), and top analysts from energy think tanks, consultancies, and NGOs. Past guests include former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, Canada’s Minister of Environment Catherine McKenna, Chevron CEO John Watson, and the World Bank’s Head of Energy Riccardo Puliti. The podcast series also features research results from CGEP-affiliated scholars and its weekly release schedule enables CGEP to address topical and relevant energy issues as they rise in the public discourse. Sloan grant support will provide funds for the production of 50 episodes of the series over each of the next two years, allow CGEP to produce transcripts of each episode, and enable necessary technical improvements to upgrade the podcast’s audio quality.

Many analyses examining the transition to a low-carbon energy system in the United States identify carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) technologies as critical in order to make progress toward deep decarbonization. These technologies have proven difficult to develop and scale, however, and much uncertainty remains about the durability and longevity of policies and incentive structures designed to demonstrate their feasibility. Funds from this grant support work by David Victor and his team at the University of California, San Diego to examine the economic, political, institutional, and technological barriers that are impeding the development of CCUS technologies. First, the team will survey the literature and develop a typology of canonical CCUS technology features being used in different CCUS demonstration facilities, such as the adopted method of carbon dioxide sequestration or the planned industrial use of the carbon dioxide byproduct. They will then select a set of demonstration plants that represent a broad array of different CCUS features to study, conducting semi-structured interviews with a wide range of industry leaders, government representatives, scientists, engineers, and non-governmental actors involved in these projects. Their analysis will focus on the regulatory, institutional, and technological barriers and opportunities that have shaped the development of CCUS technologies to date with the aim of extracting relevant lessons that can be learned as this suite of technologies moves ahead. At the end of the project, the UCSD team will organize a structured workshop to review the research results and share findings with the broader community of researchers and practitioners.

There is a growing debate in the energy and environment community about the role to be played by geoengineering as a response to climate change. Solar radiation management (SRM) technologies, which involve injecting aerosol particles into the atmosphere to cool the Earth by reflecting sunlight, are increasingly central to these discussions. SRM technologies may be developed quickly, have the potential to be relatively inexpensive, and could be easily scaled. However, SRM research and its associated deployment raises many underexplored concerns related to moral hazard, technological uncertainty, unintended externalities, and potential irreversibility. In particular, little is known about the public’s understanding of SRM technologies, their potential concerns, and what procedural and governance safeguards might be put in place to allay them. A multidisciplinary team of scholars at Arizona State University (ASU) proposes to conduct a series of public dialogues with the aim to better understand public views on the development, and deployment of SRM technologies. First, the ASU team will conduct an initial framing and design workshop with subject matter experts to develop rubrics for discussing SRM technologies with the public. Next, they will hold two forums, one in Arizona and the other in Boston, each involving over a hundred members of the lay public. Trained social scientists will lead structured focus groups that will inform participants about SRM technologies and solicit their views and perspectives. Multiple forms of qualitative and quantitative data will be collected throughout the process, including pre- and post- event surveys and interviews. A final expert workshop will then integrate and assess collected data and present findings to policymakers and the research community.

Researchers Tanya Heikkila and Chris Weible from the University of Colorado, Denver plan to undertake a research project that will examine the role played by different stakeholders and policy actors in contributing to the degree of conflict and concord surrounding the siting of energy infrastructure projects. Heikkila and Weible will examine stakeholder coalitions formed during the planning, permitting, and approval stages of various energy infrastructure projects, including renewable energy projects (wind farms and large-scale solar installations), transmission lines, and pipeline build-outs. They will first identify a variety of recently proposed large-scale energy infrastructure siting projects. They will then focus on a select set of each project type, representing a diverse array of stakeholder coalition characteristics, for more detailed study. Projects under study will include not only successful siting projects but also those that were terminated or abandoned due to stakeholder opposition. Heikkila and Weible will then interview key stakeholders and policy actors involved in the siting of each project and conduct detailed textual analyses of media coverage and public records related to permitting decisions.

This proposed grant will provide partial funding for four Ph.D. students per year for two years (eight total) to conduct research on energy data analytics at Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab (EDAL). Candidates will be drawn from a range of natural and social science disciplines—economics, engineering, environmental science, computer science, statistics, mathematics—and will be required to have faculty supervisors drawn from both energy-related domains and data-science relevant disciplines. Each pre-doctoral fellow will be expected to produce at least one paper that emerges from their fellowship research. All datasets produced will be made available through the EDAL repository. Fellows will has access to EDAL’s high performance computing environments and have the opportunity to lead an undergraduate energy data science team over a summer term. An Energy Data Analytics Symposium will be held at the end of the grant period to feature student work and that of invited internal and external senior scholars.

Among the most critical, unanswered research questions in energy and environmental policy is determining the economic impact of carbon dioxide emissions on society. This measure, the social cost of carbon (SCC), is defined as the dollar value cost to society of emitting one ton of carbon dioxide (or carbon dioxide equivalent gas) into the atmosphere. Estimating the SCC is necessary for conducting cost-benefit analyses of more than 150 federal laws and regulations in the United States. This grant to Resources for the Future (RFF) provides partial support for a large scale initiative that would develop an improved computational platform for estimating the SCC. RFF plans to put in place an integrated, modular framework that disaggregates the SCC estimation process into four distinct modules: socioeconomics, climate, damages, and discounting. Doing so will allow the best natural and social science research in each area to inform projections and estimations on each topic. These modules will then be linked together through an open source, computationally efficient, publicly accessible, and fully documented platform. This approach will help economists and climate scientists better compare similarities and differences among the three major integrated climate assessment models that underpin the SCC.

This grant to the Council on Library and Information Resources funds a fellowship program for four, two-year postdocs interested in working at the intersection of energy economics and data science. As large, complex datasets on energy production, transportation, and use become increasingly available, demand has emerged for a new type of scholar with one foot firmly in energy economics—the data it uses, the questions it asks, the methodologies it deploys—and one foot in data science. These fellowships aim to fill some of that need by creating postdoctoral positions that provide such training. Supported fellows will work on a diverse array of projects such as energy data visualization, integrating multiple datasets, and establishing university-wide energy data storage and access platforms. Fellows will be placed at four energy research centers that are existing grantees in the Foundation’s Energy and Environment program: University of California Berkeley’s Energy Institute at Haas, the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, Duke University’s Energy Data Analytics Lab, and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. Fellows will be selected in close cooperation with researchers at each institute, ensuring that candidates have both the skills and research interests each institute needs. As a signal of demand for the fellows, participating Centers have agreed to cover 50% of each fellow’s stipend and benefits costs. The fellowship program will be administered by the Council on Library and Information Resources, which has experience running several successful fellowship programs and has well-established recruitment, selection, mentoring, and professional development processes, including annual network-building workshops and the provision of micro-grants to selected fellows for collaborative projects.