How Materials Science Is Helping to Mitigate Climate Change

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a leader in carbon removal and mitigation, working to develop materials and technologies to help the nation meet its net-zero carbon emissions goals. LLNL brings a multidisciplinary approach to the rapid development of advanced materials and manufacturing processes. Watch this video to learn more.

Transcript

00:00:02 climate change is affecting the critical infrastructure that plays a key role in our national security Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is working to advance understanding of the global climate system develop Technologies to reduce accumulation of greenhouse gases and pursue the domestic production and supply of affordable clean energy to fulfill its Mission the lab is

00:00:27 leveraging its scientific capabilities in advanced materials and Manufacturing my name is Simon Pang I'm a Staff scientist here at the lab and I lead ll's carbon capture and direct air capture program our team works on materials and Technologies to help the nation meet its uh Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions goals so our direct air capture program is unique within the

00:00:57 National Lab system in that we focus specifically on material's lifetimes the lab has a history of being a leader in carbon removal technology and we look at this kind of range of different Technologies and understanding where we might apply different carbon removal or carbon mitigation Technologies uh around the nation for a direct air capture process where we're trying to reuse this

00:01:18 material many thousands of times uh the lifetime really matters in determining whether or not it's an economically viable process so one of the places we're looking uh to move forward in is really being able to design material are suited for specific locations for example the type of material you might use here in California where our weather's fairly mild isn't necessarily

00:01:39 the type of material you might use in say the Upper Midwest where you have larger temperature swings I'm an experimentalist working on lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles we're really trying to do three things one is make them cheaper cuz we all want cheaper cars and then we are also trying trying to make them go further on a single charge and then

00:02:02 we're also concerned about safety one of the things we're doing is looking at solid state batteries this is a Next Generation technology uh so in conventional lithium ion batteries you have a liquid electrolyte and that transpor ions back and forth between the positive and the negative sides of the battery but um that is flammable so that's what's

00:02:23 causing a lot of the issues with conventional lithium ion batteries but we are trying to move to a solid material instead I think what excites me most about battery research is that we are working on a relevant problem um and what we do will hopefully make a difference in the world an actual something that we can see tangible difference in the world what I really

00:02:46 like about this work is that we're addressing a national need uh that has global scale implications for removing carbon dioxide and achieving climate security for more information about ll's multidisciplinary approach to climate and energy security visit llnl.gov purpose forward slm missions