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In 2019, a National Research Traineeship (NRT) grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation seeded the establishment of a new model for graduate education at Ohio State University – a large, public, land-grant R-1 university in the U.S. Midwest. This grant application involved faculty from eight different colleges within this university (education; engineering; public affairs; arts and sciences; food, agriculture, and environmental sciences; business; law). The Ohio State EmPOWERment Program in convergent graduate training for a sustainable energy future enrolls Ph.D. students studying any aspect of energy from degree programs any college in Ohio State and engages them in several curricular and co-curricular elements that are designed to dovetail with their Ph.D. degree program requirements in ways that do not extend their time to graduate. The Ohio State EmPOWERment Program established at Ohio State an energy Student Community of Practice and Engagement (SCOPE), a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization (GIS), and an undergraduate Research in Sustainable Energy (RISE) summer research experience. Over time a JOULE energy seminar series (JOULE) was added to elevate intellectual engagement in for trainees in The Ohio State EmPOWERment Program and broaden their engagement with researchers across this university. This paper investigates the development and accentuation of innovation capacities of Ph.D. trainees in The Ohio State EmPOWERment Program relative to other Ph.D. students who enrolled in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines at Ohio State and did not participate in the Ohio State EmPOWERment Program. This work considers three different constructs for each of three scales (i.e., Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Cognitive). Of the nine different constructs, six pass assumption tests and pre-test scores for innovation self-concept, proactivity, social networking, risk-taking or tolerance, creative capacity, and intention to innovate are significant predictors of post-test capacities. Overall, participating in The Ohio State EmPOWERment Program appears to be beneficial and may increase innovation self-concept, proactivity, creative, and intention to innovate capacities. 

Sedimentary basins are attractive for geothermal development due to their ubiquitous presence, high perme­ ability, and extensive lateral extent. Geothermal energy from sedimentary basins has mostly been used for direct heating purposes due to their relatively low temperatures, compared to conventional hydrothermal systems. However, there is an increasing interest in using sedimentary geothermal energy for electric power generation due to the advances in conversion technologies using binary cycles that allow electricity generation from reservoir temperatures as low as 80 ◦C. This work develops and implements analytical solutions for calculating reservoir impedance, reservoir heat depletion, and wellbore heat loss in sedimentary reservoirs that are laterally extensive, homogeneous, horizontally isotropic and have uniform thickness. Reservoir impedance and wellbore heat loss solutions are combined with a power cycle model to estimate the electricity generation potential. Results from the analytical solutions are in good agreement with numerically computed reservoir models. Our results suggest that wellbore heat loss can be neglected in many cases of electricity generation calculations, depending on the reservoir transmissivity. The reservoir heat depletion solution shows how reservoir tempera­ ture and useful lifetime behave as a function of flow rate, initial heat within the reservoir, and heat conduction from the surroundings to the reservoir. Overall, our results suggest that in an exploratory sedimentary geothermal field, these analytical solutions can provide reliable first order estimations without incurring intensive computational costs. 

The use of geologically stored CO2 as a geothermal heat extraction fluid can take advantage of the beneficial thermophysical characteristics of CO2 that can render it a more effective heat extraction fluid than the brine that exists in the aquifers. Some of these characteristics include a higher mobility (inverse kinematic viscosity) in reservoir conditions and a highly temperature-dependent density that can result in a naturally self-convecting thermosiphon between injection and production wells. This thermosiphon may reduce or eliminate the need for subsurface pumps—and the associated parasitic pumping power—for fluid circulation. Part of the utility of such a CO2 capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) system is the possibility to generate baseload or dispatchable electricity with levelized costs of electricity (LCOEs) that are on par with the LCOEs of other energy technologies of regional electricity systems. 

In the carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) process, pipeline infrastructure may be used to redirect carbon dioxide (CO2) flows from leaking geologic CO2 storage reservoirs to those with storage integrity. We developed and implemented an approach that combined results from the Leakage Risk Monetization Model (LRiMM) that monetizes leakage risk from individual reservoirs with the Scalable infrastructure Model for CO2 capture and storage (SimCCS) to determine the optimal deployment of integrated capture-transport-storage systems that are robust to leakage. We demonstrate this approach using a case study of 27 known coal-fired power plants in the U.S. state of Michigan and 42 potential CO2 storage locations in the Michigan Sedimentary Basin. We compare three cases of leakage risk: (1) as a base case, reservoir leakage risk was not considered, (2) first-of-a-kind leakage risk, which does not consider the reduction in risk from re-directing CO2 from leaking reservoirs, and (3) nth-of-a-kind risk that considers this reduction in risk. The results highlight the selection of reservoirs that quantitatively considers leakage risk, geospatial differences in infrastructure deployment that considers leakage risk, and the nominal increase in costs and total pipeline lengths for these systems.