News Releases

For geothermal fields around the world, produced geothermal brine has been simply injected back underground, but now it’s become clear that the brines produced at the Salton Sea geothermal field contain an immense amount of lithium, a critical resource need for low-carbon transportation and energy storage. Demand for lithium is skyrocketing, as it is an essential ingredient in lithium-ion batteries. Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have recently published a comprehensive review of past and current technologies for extracting minerals from geothermal brine.

Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are making a concerted push to take thermal energy storage to the next level. To overcome some of the limitations of traditional water-based thermal energy storage, Berkeley Lab scientists are looking at developing next-generation materials and systems to be used as a heating or cooling medium. They are also creating a framework to analyze costs as well as a tool to compare cost savings. In a series of papers published this year, Berkeley Lab researchers have reported important advances in each of these areas.

Researchers at Berkeley Lab have demonstrated how coating copper catalysts with thin films can improve a standard technique for converting carbon dioxide emissions into useful chemicals and liquid fuels.

A new Berkeley Lab analysis finds that if greenhouse gas emissions continue along the high-emissions scenario, low-to-no-snow winters will become a regular occurrence in the western U.S. in 35 to 60 years.

New Berkeley Lab breakthroughs: engineering chemical-producing microbes; watching enzyme reactions in real time; capturing the first image of ‘electron ice’; revealing how skyrmions really move

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley have developed a cheap and efficient way to produce pure titanium metal. Their approach is scalable for commercial production, and produces an easily recycled product.

Scientists at Berkeley Lab and the Technical University of Munich have developed a new technique that allows researchers to synthesize a perovskite solar material, characterize its crystal structure, and test its response to light at the same time.

Having good room ventilation to dilute and disperse indoor air pollutants has long been recognized, and with the COVID-19 pandemic its importance has become all the more heightened. But new experiments by Berkeley Lab indoor air researchers show that certain circumstances will result in poor mixing of room air, meaning airborne contaminants may not be effectively dispersed and removed by building level ventilation.

The cold polar oceans give rise to some of the largest food webs on Earth. And at their base are microscopic, photosynthetic algae. But human-induced climate change, a new study suggests, is displacing these important cold-water communities of algae with warm-adapted ones, a trend that threatens to destabilize the delicate marine food web and change the oceans as we know them.