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SCs is alpha boron-derived structured and crystallizes in the orthorhombic Immm space group. The structure is three-dimensional. Cs1+ is bonded in a 6-coordinate geometry to six equivalent S1- atoms. There are four shorter (3.52 Å) and two longer (3.61 Å) Cs–S bond lengths. S1- is bonded in a 7-coordinate geometry to six equivalent Cs1+ and one S1- atom. The S–S bond length is 2.12 Å.
SCs is Tetraauricupride structured and crystallizes in the cubic Pm-3m space group. The structure is three-dimensional. Cs1+ is bonded in a body-centered cubic geometry to eight equivalent S1- atoms. All Cs–S bond lengths are 3.66 Å. S1- is bonded in a body-centered cubic geometry to eight equivalent Cs1+ atoms.
Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) and Southern Company Services (SCS) will cooperatively engage in research and development activities to explore the safety, environmental and economic implications of blending gaseous hydrogen into natural gas distribution systems.
This document details the execution of Cooperative Agreement DE-FE0031847, “Front End Engineering Design of Linde-BASF Advanced Post-Combustion Carbon Dioxide (CO 2 ) Capture Technology at a Southern Company Natural Gas-Fired Power Plant” during the period of 10/1/2019 to 6/30/2022. The project was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and managed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). Southern Company Services, Inc. (SCS) was the prime recipient and led the project team. Other members of the project team included Linde, Inc. (Linde), Linde Engineering – Dresden (LED), and BASF. The overall goal of the project was to complete a front-end engineering design (FEED) study for installing the Linde-BASF post-combustion capture (PCC) technology at an existing domestic natural gas-fired combined cycle (NGCC) power plant within Southern Company’s portfolio of assets. The CO 2 capture plant was to be of commercial scale (at least 375 MWe) and include process units for pre-conditioning of the flue gas system, the CO 2 capture plant island, storage vessels, the CO 2 compression train, and any necessary components for integration into the NGCC plant. Mississippi Power’s Plant Daniel Unit #4 was chosen as the host site for the FEED with the target of capturing 90% of CO 2 emissions from the existing combustion turbines. The information produced by the FEED was used to develop a cost estimate of +/- 15% accuracy. Capital costs, excluding financing, are estimated at approximately $\$752$ million dollars (2021). The execution of a project based on this FEED study has an estimated duration of almost five years.
Advanced carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer significant potential for reducing anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, while minimizing the cost of employing these technologies. Under the Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (ICCS) Program, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) collaborated with industry in cost-sharing arrangements to demonstrate technologies that captured CO2 emissions from industrial sources and either stored or beneficially re-use them. The technologies included in the ICCS program progressed beyond the research and development stage to a scale that can be deployed into commercial practice within the industry. The Illinois Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage (IL-ICCS) project sought to demonstrate the ability of the Mt. Simon Sandstone to accept and retain industrial-scale volumes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from an anthropogenic source for permanent geologic sequestration. The project was a collaboration of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) Company, the Illinois State Geological Survey (ISGS), Schlumberger Carbon Services (SCS), and Richland Community College (RCC), and had average annual injection rate of between 1,500 and 2,400 metric tons per day (MTPD) or 0.5 to 0.7 million metric tons (MMT) annually. The project site is in Decatur, Illinois on the property of ADM and RCC (Fig 1) and is directly adjacent to the Illinois Basin – Decatur Project (IBDP), a large scale pilot project of the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium (MGSC), which collected and injected CO2 from the ADM fuel ethanol production unit, where high purity biogenic CO2 is produced during the anaerobic fermentation of sugars to alcohol. The IL-ICCS project had an operational period of approximately six (6) years, in which 3.5 MMT of CO2 was captured, compressed, injected, and permanently stored in the Mt Simon Sandstone.
GTI Energy (GTI) and team members Southern Company Services (SCS), Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) performed a Phase II Pre-Feed Study under contract DE-FE0032008 for Hydrogen Storage for Load-Following and Clean Power. The configuration of the proposed system consists of subsystems for on-site H 2 production, on-site H 2 storage (up to 54 MWth in commercial vessels) and H 2 combustion in a duct burner in a Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG) integrated with an existing fossil asset. Here, the firing rate of the duct burner is varied to let the plant respond to fluctuations of electrical load and H 2 production is relatively constant by storing H 2 . The proposed system is an improvement over alternate low carbon dispatchable power options. Technoeconomic analyses show H 2 produced with GTI’s patented Compact Hydrogen Generator (CHG) with inherent carbon capture will be lower cost (Levelized Cost of Hydrogen, LCOH) relative to hydrogen produced with a Steam Methane Reformer (SMR) with an amine system for carbon capture. This lower cost hydrogen enables our integrated system to deliver electricity (Levelized Cost of Electricity, LCOE) at 17.4% lower cost relative to a SMR sourced H 2 -fired HRSG (with an amine system for carbon capture) – Steam Turbine Generator (STG). Our analysis using EPRI’s US REGEN macroeconomic model shows our system will have significant demand in the power market and therefore require significant capacity expansion (CHG plants built to deliver hydrogen) to deliver low cost, low carbon power. In Phase II, our Team has completed a detailed system definition including the development of process models, definition of battery limits, Process Flow Diagrams (PFDs), Piping and Instrumentation Drawings (P&IDs), and a plant layout. A preliminary design for the key components of the CHG was developed including component lists & specifications. An evaluation of environmental and permitting considerations was completed and included the development of an Environmental Information Volume (EIV). The duct burners, which are flexible and can burn hydrogen and/or natural gas, were defined and initial CFD analyses were completed.
The twilight zone is an important depth of the ocean where particulate organic matter (POM) remineralization takes place, and prokaryotes contribute to more than 70% of the estimated remineralization. However, little is known about the microbial community and metabolic activity associated with different particles in the twilight zone. The composition and distribution of particle-attached prokaryotes in the twilight zone of the South China Sea (SCS) were investigated using high-throughput sequencing and quantitative PCR, together with the Biolog Ecoplate™ microplates culture to analyze the microbial metabolic activity. We found that α- and γ-Proteobacteria dominating at the lower and upper boundary of the twilight zone, respectively; Methanosarcinales and Halobacteriales of the Euyarchaeota occupied in the larger particles at the upper boundary. Similar microbial community existed between euphotic layer and the upper boundary. Higher amount of shared Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) in the larger particles along the water depths, might be due to the fast sinking and major contribution of carbon flux of the larger particles from the euphotic layer. In addition to polymers as the major carbon source, carbohydrates and amino acids were preferentially used by microbial community at the upper and lower boundary, respectively. This could potentially be attributed to the metabolic capabilities of attached microbial groups in different particles, and reflected the initial preference of the carbon source by the natural microbes in the twilight zone as well. The microbial structure and carbon metabolic profiles could be complemented with metatranscriptomic analysis in future studies to augment the understanding of the complex carbon cycling pathways in the twilight zone.
One-step solution combustion synthesis (SCS) methods for fabricating durable crystalline transuranic-doped rare earth zirconium pyrochlores are described. Methods are fast, amenable to upscaling, and present a simple strategy for producing crystalline ceramic materials that meet the minimum attractiveness criteria for special nuclear material. The methods include analysis of reactants and reaction conditions to select proper fuel as well as proper fuel content so as to encourage formation of the crystalline product in a single-step synthesis procedure.
In a weak link of two s-wave superconductors (SCs) coupled via a time-reversal-invariant (TRI) topological superconducting (TSC) island, a Josephson current can flow due to Cooper pairs tunneling in and out of spatially separated Majorana Kramers pairs (MKPs), which are doublets of Majorana bound states (MBSs). The sign of the resulting Josephson current is fixed by the joint parity of the four Majorana bound states that make up the MKPs on the TSC island. This parity-controlled Josephson effect can be used as a read-out mechanism for the joint parity in Majorana-based quantum computing. For a TSC island with four terminals, the SC leads can address a Majorana superconducting qubit (MSQ) formed by the charge ground states of the TSC island's terminals. Cooper pair splitting enables single-qubit operations, qubit read-out, as well as two-qubit entangling gates. Hence, TSC islands between SC leads may provide an alternative approach to superconducting quantum computation.
With the potential environmental impacts of conventional fossil fuels and the technology advances of grid interactive power electronics, inverter-based resources (IBRs) are playing a crucial role in modern power grids. However, due to the lack of physical inertia, IBRs are vulnerable to system disturbances. Further, conventional grid-following (GFL) inverters cannot actively establish the frequency and voltage, which could not be a appropriate solution for 100% inverter-based power grids. Grid-forming (GFM) control, as an emerging inverter control function, has drawn great attention in recent years, while it is still under development and pre-mature for large-scale field deployment. A potential solution for gradually transitioning into a 100% inverter-based power grid is to combine both IBRs and synchronous machines into a mixed generation portfolio. More importantly, synchronous machines can be operated as synchronous condensers (SCs) until they are retired. It is also worth mentioning that the stability analysis is of great importance to ensure the smooth transition from existing power grids to 100% inverter-based system, which is the main focus of this work with detailed modeling and modal analysis.
This work presents a formal review of smart contracts, including definitions, technical requirements, and potential power and energy-related use cases. This includes in-depth discussions covering cybersecurity, legality and interoperability goals that must be taken into consideration by potential end-users. The paper presents a first attempt towards the standardization of smart contracts (SCs) within the field of power and energy as a work in progress activity under the IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) P2418.5 Working Group. This work also proposes a holistic, language-agnostic reference model that is intended to accelerate the adoption of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) by industry stakeholders by providing standardized processes. Finally, the paper discusses key takeaways that must continue to be developed to increase SC usage within the energy industry.
A qubit device for use in a quantum computing environment includes a semiconductor substrate, an insulating layer disposed on at least a portion of an upper surface of the substrate, and a transition metal silicide (TMSi) heterojunction disposed on at least a portion of an upper surface of the insulating layer. The TMSi heterojunction includes a link layer and at least first and second TMSi regions coupled with the link layer. The link layer may include a normal conductor, thereby forming a superconductor-normal conductor-superconductor (SNS) junction, or a geometric constriction, thereby forming a superconductor-geometric constriction-superconductor (ScS) junction. The link layer may form at least a portion of a channel including intrinsic or doped silicon.
Smart contracts (SCs) are a set of logical procedures that can run by individual peers participating within a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) network. By design, smart contracts inherit many of the benefits of DLT, including its immutability, scalability, and security properties. Nevertheless, they may introduce additional attack vectors, which can lead to cybersecurity explorations that could jeopardize the end-application ability to operate as intended or result in data leaks, and privacy violations. In this work, an exploration of known problems, and possible attack scenarios will be presented. This is followed by a set of proposed best practices and mitigation strategies that are intended to assist developers, researchers, and other relevant stakeholders to develop secure SC implementations.
Utilizing the devised SCS technique, crystalline transuranic-doped zirconate pyrochlores were formed for the first time without the need for a subsequent heating step. Typically, materials rapidly synthesized in a single-step self-sustaining exothermic reaction require further heating to induce crystallization and purify the product. The need for this secondary processing step can be attributed to factors such as an improper oxidizer to fuel ratio and the utilization of strong complexing compounds as fuels (i.e., reducing agents), all of which hinder complete combustion. The efficacy of the developed process was demonstrated by fabricating crystalline plutonium-doped Gd2Zr2O7 from solutions containing metal nitrates and urea in a properly tuned ratio