2021 Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage: Permanently Removing CO2 from Our Emissions and Atmosphere

2135530 (Gadikota). This grant provides funding to support U.S -based graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and early career investigators to attend the 2021 Gordon Research Conference on Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS ) to be held October 24-29, 2021 at Sunday River, Maine. The conference will serve as a forum to discuss scientific advancements, technological progress, and policy implications associated with permanently removing CO2 from emissions and the atmosphere.

The conference will address opportunities and challenges at the forefront of smart carbon management including process-intensified, energy efficient pathways for capturing, storing, and utilizing carbon, novel materials for removing carbon from dilute and distributed sources, integrated reaction and transport considerations in natural and engineered environments, efficient CO2 recycling strategies, and policy and environmental justice implications for deploying these technologies. The conference is designed to foster international collaborations in the area of carbon management and facilitate the co-creation of scalable, deployable pathways for a sustainable climate future.

The need to attract and train the next generation work-force to tackle challenging problems in the field of carbon capture, utilization, storage, removal, and recycling is critical. To address this challenge, the Gordon Research Seminar (GRS) on CCUS has been organized in tandem with the conference. This seminar will involve the participation of early career researchers who organize discussions for ambitious and creative approaches to develop and sustain innovative careers in the area of carbon management.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.