Reusing old oil and gas wells may offer green energy storage solution

Penn State

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources like wind and solar will require better ways to store energy for use when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing. A new study by researchers at Penn State found that taking advantage of natural geothermal heat in depleted oil and gas wells can improve the efficiency of one proposed energy storage solution: compressed-air energy storage (CAES).

The researchers recently published their findings in the Journal of Energy Storage.

CAES plants compress air and store it underground when energy demand is low and then extract the air to create electricity when demand is high. But startup costs currently limit commercial development of these projects, the scientists said.

The researchers proposed a new geothermal-assisted compressed-air energy storage system that makes use of depleted oil and gas wells — the Environmental Protection Agency estimates there are around 3.9 million in the United States — and found it can improve efficiency by 9.5% over the existing technology. This means a larger percentage of the energy stored in the system can be recovered and turned into electricity, potentially boosting profits for operators.  

“This improvement in efficiency can be a game changer to justify the economics of compressed-air energy storage projects,” said Arash Dahi Taleghani, professor of petroleum and natural gas engineering at Penn State and corresponding author on the study. “And on top of that, we could significantly avoid the upfront cost by using existing oil and gas wells that are no longer in production. This could be a win, win situation.”

Reusing depleted oil and gas wells would allow operators to access geothermal heat in hot rock formations underground, eliminating upfront costs of drilling new wells and potentially making the technology more appealing to industry, the scientists said.

Gases like compressed air increase in pressure as temperatures increase, meaning the heated wells could potentially store more energy, according to Taleghani. When electricity is needed, the heated, compressed air is released, driving a turbine to produce power.

“Without taking advantage of the geothermal setup, you could not get enough encouraging numbers,” Taleghani said, explaining that the team used numerical modeling simulations to find that placing CAES systems in abandoned oil and gas wells significantly increased the air temperature in the systems. “And on top of that, drilling new wells may not justify the economics of this type of storage. But by combining these two factors, and by going back and forth through modeling and simulation, we found this could be a very good solution.”

Energy storage options like CAES are particularly important in the transition to clean energy, according to the researchers, because they help address the intermittent nature of renewable sources. By storing excess renewable energy and releasing it when needed, energy storage contributes to grid stability and reliability.

“The problem is that sometimes when we need energy, there is no sunshine or there is no wind,” Taleghani said. “That’s a big barrier against further expansion of most of the renewable energy that is available to us. That’s why it's very important to have some storage capacity to support the grid.”

Repurposing depleted oil and gas wells may also help mitigate potential environmental impacts of abandoned wells and potentially provide new job opportunities in areas with rich energy industry traditions, the researchers said.

In Pennsylvania alone, regulators estimate there are hundreds of thousands of orphaned and abandoned wells. If these wells are improperly plugged, or damaged, they can leak methane into the atmosphere and groundwater.

“If we use existing wells, we are basically hitting two birds with one stone,” Taleghani said. “First, we are sealing these wells. That stops any potential leaks. And then if we are repurposing these wells for energy storage, we are still using the infrastructure that is in place in these communities. It can potentially maintain employment in the area and allow communities to be part of the energy future.”

This research was conducted as part of the Repurposing Center for Energy Transition (ReCET) at Penn State. The center seeks to repurpose fossil energy infrastructure for energy transition applications, especially in legacy energy communities.

Also contributing from Penn State were Derek Elsworth, G. Albert Shoemaker Chair in Mineral Engineering and professor of energy and geo-environmental engineering, and Qitao Zhang, a postdoctoral scholar, both in the John and Willie Leone Family Department of Energy and Mineral Engineering.

The U.S. Department of Energy supported this research.

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Journal

Journal of Energy Storage

DOI

10.1016/j.est.2025.115317 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Underground energy storage using abandoned oil & gas wells assisted by geothermal

 

Discrepancies between national climate targets and citizens' willingness to contribute to climate action

Study finds that governments are guided by ethical principles but cost-benefit considerations take priority for their citizens

University of Oldenburg

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In the bid to combat climate change, the signatory states to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change periodically submit voluntary targets specifying a percentage by which they pledge to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (Percentage Reduction Pledges, PRPs). In an empirical study, Prof. Dr. Heinz Welsch, an environmental economist at the University of Oldenburg, Germany investigated the extent to which these "national climate targets" correspond to the willingness of the citizens of the respective countries to contribute to climate change mitigation (Willingness to Contribute, WTC) and published his findings in the journal Ecological Economics.

Welsch concludes that country-specific factors such as per-capita income, emissions levels and temperatures play a significant role for both variables (PRPs and WTC), but that whereas these factors were positively correlated to the percentage reduction pledges, they were negatively correlated to willingness to contribute – and that there is also a correlation with levels of satisfaction with democracy.

In his study Welsch compares the national climate targets of 123 nations – last agreed in 2021 – with globally representative data. Almost 130,000 people in 125 nations were surveyed in 2021 and 2022 for the Global Climate Change Survey, which was published last year. One key finding of the survey was that a large majority of the world's population supports climate protection measures: 89 percent of the respondents would like to see more political action against climate change from their national governments, and 69 percent said they would be willing to contribute one percent of their income towards measures to combat climate change.

Welsch used these data to test a model he developed to analyse the interplay between cost-benefit considerations, ethical principles and citizens' preferences. His study focused on the question of which factors are relevant in determining the climate protection targets of national governments and the willingness of citizens to contribute to climate change mitigation. It showed that "per-capita income" and "per-capita emissions" were key factors for both variables and that the average temperatures of the past decade were also relevant.

Welsch found that the higher a country's income and emissions levels, the more ambitious its government's climate targets were, whereas the opposite was the case regarding people's willingness to contribute to climate change mitigation: the higher the income and emissions, the less willing the population was to contribute to fighting climate change. Diverging trends can also be observed regarding the temperature factor: the willingness to contribute to climate protection is greater in warmer countries than in colder ones, but countries with colder climates pursue more ambitious climate targets.

The figures for Germany align with these findings: Germany was among the most ambitious countries in the last round of pledges. With an emissions reduction target of 39.7 percent for the period between 2019 and 2030, it ranked 12th out of 123 on this score. However, according to the Climate Change Survey, although willingness among the German population to contribute to climate action was also high, it was lower than in most other countries. With 67.9 percent of German respondents saying they would be willing to give up one percent of their income each month to contribute to climate action, Germany ranked 74th in the international comparison. Asked whether the government should do more to fight climate change, 86 percent of respondents said yes – leaving Germany in 89th place out of 123.

The study interprets these findings as indicative of a conflict between the United Nations' climate ethics principle of the "common but differentiated responsibilities" of states, which emphasises fairness and equity, and the cost-benefit calculations that prevail among the populations included in the analysis. "People assume that the lower the temperatures in a country are, the less impact climate change will have there," explains Welsch, At the same time people in countries with high per-capita emissions fear that climate protection measures will have a negative impact on their economy, he adds. "Cost-benefit calculations therefore make it likely that in colder, richer and more carbon-intensive countries there will be less willingness to contribute to climate protection."

"In sum, there is a discrepancy between the relatively ambitious climate targets of rich and carbon-intensive countries in colder regions and the lower levels of willingness among their populations to contribute to combating climate change," explains Welsch. The study also shows that there is a correlation between this discrepancy and lower levels of satisfaction with democracy: the more ambitious a government's climate targets compared to the population's willingness to contribute to climate protection, the lower the proportion of the population that is satisfied with the functioning of democracy in that country. "This is not necessarily a causal relationship," the environmental economist hastens to emphasise. Nevertheless, pursuing a climate policy that involves sacrifices on the part of the population without promoting the advance of radical forces that exploit the climate issue for their own purposes poses a challenge for democratic societies, he notes.

According to Welsch, the dilemma posed by an ambitious climate policy could be addressed by introducing political instruments that mitigate the economic and social impact of climate protection measures. As one such potential instrument he proposes a climate fund through which revenues from emissions taxes are distributed to the economically weaker sections of a population.

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Jour

nal

Ecological Economics

DOI

10.1016/j.ecolecon.2025.108520 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Are national climate change mitigation pledges shaped by citizens' mitigation preferences? Evidence from globally representative data

DEI IS MERITORIOUS

Geological Society of America aames Emily Orzechowski as Director of Geoscience Policy & External Relations

Geological Society of America

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Boulder, Colo., USA: The Geological Society of America (GSA) is delighted to welcome Emily Orzechowski as its new Director of Geoscience Policy & External Relations. With extensive experience in legislative relations, science policy, and geoscience research, Orzechowski will lead GSA’s advocacy efforts to support the geoscience community and its contributions to society.

Orzechowski joins GSA from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), where she managed legislative relations for over 120 member institutions specializing in Earth system science. Previously, she served as an AAAS Congressional Science Fellow in the Office of U.S. Senator Michael F. Bennet and as an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Climate Adaptation Science Center. She also represented the United States as a delegate to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in Paris, France.

A paleontologist by training, Orzechowski earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, where she analyzed environmental changes recorded in the Pleistocene marine terraces of Southern California. She holds a bachelor's degree in Integrated Biology from the College of William and Mary with Interdisciplinary Honors in Geology. Her academic achievements include receiving the Winifred Goldring Award from the Paleontological Society and the Association for Women Geoscientists.

“I am honored to join GSA in its mission to advance geoscience through policy advocacy,” says Orzechowski. “Science-informed policies are essential for addressing critical societal challenges, and I look forward to advancing GSA’s priorities in Washington and beyond.”

“Emily’s expertise in science policy and legislative relations makes her an outstanding addition to GSA,” adds Melanie Brandt, GSA’s CEO and Executive Director. “Having her in this key role will help GSA ensure that knowledge and insights deeply rooted in science lead to the creation of sound public policy.”

Nathan Niemi, Acting President of the GSA Council, expanded on the excitement of Orzechowski joining the GSA staff. “Advocacy for the geosciences in the public domain is more crucial now than ever. GSA is committed to supporting our members who work in the public sector, championing support for geoscience research, and confronting the geoscience-related challenges faced by our communities. Emily’s appointment reinforces GSA’s dedication to bridging geoscience and public policy. By strengthening connections between researchers and decision-makers, she will help ensure that geoscientists play a central role in shaping policies on natural resource management, climate resilience, and public safety.”

To learn more about GSA’s public policy advocacy, please read GSA’s Position Statements and subscribe to the GSA Public Policy Newsletter.

About The Geological Society of America

The Geological Society of America (GSA) is a global professional society with more than 17,000 members across over 100 countries. As a leading voice for the geosciences, GSA advances the understanding of Earth's dynamic processes and fosters collaboration among scientists, educators, and policymakers. GSA publishes Geology, the top-ranked geoscience journal, along with a diverse portfolio of scholarly journals, books, and conference proceedings—several of which rank among Amazon’s top 100 best-selling geology titles.

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Virginia Tech researchers publish revolutionary blueprint to fuse wireless technologies and AI

Virginia Tech

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image: 

“We could actually overcome some of the current network limitations, unleashing a completely new era of wireless networking. It is a win-win strategy for the wireless and AI evolutions," Walid Saad said.

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Credit: Photo by Peter Means for Virginia Tech.

There’s a major difference between humans and current artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities: common sense. According to a new visionary paper by Walid Saad, professor in the College of Engineering and the Next-G Wireless Lead at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus, a true revolution in wireless technologies is only possible through endowing the system with the next generation of AI that can think, imagine, and plan akin to humans.

Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Journal's Special Issue on the Road to 6G with Ph.D. student Omar Hashash and postdoctoral associate Christo Thomas, the paper's findings suggest:

• The missing link in the wireless revolution is next-generation AI.
• The missing link in the next generation of AI is wireless technologies.
• The solution is to bring AI closer to human intelligence through common sense.

“We’re looking at least 10 or 15 years down the line before we have a wireless network with artificial general intelligence [AGI] that can think, plan, and imagine,” said Saad, who is a professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We have a blueprint and concrete road map. The entire vision might not be immediately deployable, but pieces of it can be implemented now. We're trying to position this paper in a way to tell the community that there is a path to something really revolutionary — step by step we can work toward a living, thinking wireless network.”

Previous generations of wireless networks have been defined by several enhancements to core components, such new antennas and communication technologies that have improved performance. According to the researchers, not even the leap from 5G to 6G, characterized by the addition of an AI-architecture embedded in wireless systems and an open radio access network, will be revolutionary enough to meet future processing and networking needs. 

“That is where things start to become thrilling,” Hashash said. “The next generation of wireless networks and AI are converging hand in hand, but few are seeing how they can actually be seamlessly merged.”

Physical networks endowed with AI

At first, Saad, Hashash, and Thomas were focusing on the metaverse and building on what is currently being explored in 6G: embedding AI across wireless systems, referred to as AI-native networks. 

“The problem is researchers are using classical AI tools that are designed for other tasks such as computer vision, which makes them limited in many ways when it comes to communication networks,” Saad said. “To fuse the real world with a virtual world, you basically have to mirror it. This is not something that old school AI can do.”

Although humans develop common sense through a world model and understanding the intuitive physics of the environment, current AI systems are trained on data. They tend to extract patterns and capture underlying correlative relationships, but these AI systems cannot reasonably navigate unforeseen scenarios. In its next phase, 6G hopes to overcome this narrow, statistical, rule-based AI solution so that the network improves its sustainability, generalizability, trustworthiness, and explainability. To date, we still do not have an AI system that can deal with new and unfamiliar scenarios, because they lack an important human trait: common sense.

“Common sense allows us to deal with new scenarios, learn by analogy, and connect the dots to fill in missing plausible elements when needed,” Saad said. “Simply put, the current level of AI is good at extracting statistical relationships from data, but it’s very bad at reasoning and generalizing to novel, unexpected situations – things that most humans master perfectly.”

To blend the physical, virtual, and digital dimensions seamlessly — for example, to don a virtual reality headset and “travel” across space and time from the comfort of home — the next generation of wireless systems will need extreme wireless quality-of-service requirements for perfectly synchronizing worlds. It also will need a hyper form of AI that can enable the network to seamlessly orchestrate the physical, virtual, and digital dimensions, something that only a real human-like network can achieve. 

In a nutshell, one of the challenges for the next generation of wireless beyond 6G is not only the physical constraints of the wireless technologies, but the limited capacities of current AI technologies. 

The telecom brain

As the research continued, team members were surprised to find they were not only building on their previous wireless studies, but that their research converged with optimistic advancements in AI toward human-level intelligence. 

“On the one hand, the metaverse with its digital world can enable a real-time perception of the physical world, which is an essential factor to enable AGI-native networks,” Hashash said. “On the other hand, the metaverse promises to bring forth novel use cases and applications such as cognitive avatars that require common sense abilities.”

The metaverse, with emerging applications such as digital twins and its ability to have identical digital representations of the physical world, could provide crucial opportunities for networks to acquire perception, hyperdimensional world models, planning abilities, and analogical reasoning. This architecture would provide the missing link that would make it a real “brain,” equipping the network to handle unforeseen obstacles and predict new scenarios outside of its training data. 

“We must create wireless networks with intrinsic abilities to understand the mathematical mechanics behind the designed AI models, the physical properties of real-world objects, and their interactions with each other,” Thomas said. “This requires us to fuse mathematical principles, category theory, and neuroscience to model the physical world and understand the complex operations of the human brain. We are therefore advocating for revisiting the fundamentals in AI, wireless networks, mathematics, and neuroscience.”

Instead of incremental advances to known wireless technologies, the researchers propose a paradigm shift. This shift would surpass the AI-native wireless system anticipated with 6G and aspire to a system that is equipped with human levels of intelligence — intelligence that is learned at the intersection of the digital world  and future wireless networks Then, this AGI-native network is set to endow some of its common sense abilities to digital twins, thereby unleashing a new breed of human-like AI agents.

“The missing link is really the wireless network and its components like digital twins, because we can use a twin that exists as a basis for a world model thereby enabling human-level-like thinking and integrating these 'thought' processes in the wireless network now,” Saad said. “We could actually overcome some of the current network limitations, unleashing a completely new era of wireless networking. It is a win-win strategy for the wireless and AI evolutions.”

Original study DOI: 10.1109/JPROC.2025.3526887

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Journal

Proceedings of the IEEE

Article Title

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)-Native Wireless Systems: A Journey Beyond 6G

Article Publication Date

17-Mar-2025

 

Wayne State University research making strides in autonomous vehicle and machine systems to make them safer, more effective

Wayne State University - Office of the Vice President for Research

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Zheng Dong, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science in Wayne State’s School of Engineering, was recently awarded a prestigious CAREER NSF award.

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Credit: Julie O'Connor, Wayne State University

DETROIT — A grant to Wayne State University from the National Science Foundation (NSF) is opening new doors for researchers and students to explore the future of autonomous vehicles, machines and drones.

Zheng Dong, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer science in Wayne State’s School of Engineering, was awarded a five-year, $595,611 NSF grant for the project, "CAREER: ChronosDrive: Ensuring Timing Correctness in DNN-Driven Autonomous Vehicles with Accelerator-Enhanced Real-Time SoC Integration."

“We are in an age of artificial intelligence,” said Dong. “Deep neural networks and autonomous vehicles are opening new frontiers in real-time systems research, which demands new solutions to ensure these systems are safe and effective.”

Autonomous machines, particularly those powered by deep neural networks (DNNs) in autonomous vehicles, must meet strict timing requirements that necessitate rigorous real-time safety certifications. Such certifications rely on advanced analytical methods combining worst-case execution time analysis with schedulability analysis to ensure operational safety and reliability. However, significant challenges persist in integrating worst-case execution time and schedulability analysis, especially in evaluating the timing accuracy of systems that use computing accelerators for autonomous driving.

Dong’s project aims to develop an integrated architecture that leverages hardware-software co-design to address these complex issues with the aim of significantly enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems and other autonomous machines.

“Even though we are talking about artificial intelligence, advancements in this field still rely on human innovation and creativity,” said Dong. “We hope our research lays a solid foundation for the development of safe and effective autonomous vehicle and machine systems.”

“NSF CAREER awards are prestigious honors to rising researchers that emphasize the integration of research and education,” said Ezemenari M. Obasi, Ph.D., Wayne State’s vice president for research & innovation. “Dr. Dong’s important research will incorporate AI to address the complex problems associated with autonomous driving systems and machines. Through this award, he will train computer science and engineering students to create the next generation of autonomous machines and vehicles to be safer and more reliable.”

The grant number for this award from the National Science Foundation is 2441179.

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Twenty-two year study: Adolescents engaged in fewer external risky behaviors but some report increasing mental health concerns

Boston College

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Between 1999-2021, U.S. adolescents steadily desisted from risky behaviors such as substance use and violence, and from reporting a combination of both risky behaviors and mental health symptoms. Yet a comparatively small but growing proportion of youth demonstrated elevated symptoms of depression, according to a report to be published in the April 2025 issue of Pediatrics.

The study, published online on March 18, and titled “Trends in Mental and Behavioral Health Risks in Adolescents: 1999-2021,” analyzed data from the national biennial Youth Risk Behavior Surveys distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A total of 178,658 students in the 9th-12th grades nationwide were analyzed across the entire research timeline. Results revealed that most adolescents — and increasing proportions over cohorts — ceased risky behavior such as substance use, unsafe sexual activities, and violence, and did not display signs of mental health problems such as depression, according to researchers at Boston College and San Diego State University.

However, a small group of adolescents — representing less than nine percent of those surveyed — reported heightened mental health concerns such as increased symptoms of hopelessness and suicidality, and an even smaller proportion reported both heightened risky behavior and mental health problems, necessitating additional public health measures to intervene and promote enhanced wellbeing.

The research was led by Rebekah Levine Coley, a professor and the Gabelli Family Faculty Fellow in the Counseling, Developmental and Educational Psychology department at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, in collaboration with Jane Leer, an assistant professor of Psychology at San Diego State University’s Department of Psychology, and Lindsay Lanteri, a Ph.D. candidate at the Lynch School.

“Perhaps the most important finding from this work highlights the dominant and increasing prevalence of adolescents with low levels of internalizing behaviors who are also abstaining from multiple types of behavioral health risks,” said Coley, who also directs BC’s Center for Child and Family Policy. “Simultaneously, the relatively modest but increasing number of youth reporting elevated indications of depression points to target populations for prevention and treatment efforts, which is critical information for policymakers and health practitioners seeking to optimize the well-being of U.S. adolescents.”

For an interview with the primary author, contact Rebekah Levine Coley at coleyre@bc.edu (617-552-6018) or Phil Gloudemans, Boston College University Communications at Philip.gloudemans@bc.edu (401-338-6385).

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Journal

PEDIATRICS

DOI

10.15442/peds.2024-068774 

Method of Research

Data/statistical analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Trends in Mental and Behavioral Health Risks in Adolescents: 1999-2021

Article Publication Date

18-Mar-2025

COI Statement

Professors Coley and Leer, and Ms. Lanteri, have no conflicts of interest relevant to this article.