Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
07/13/12
Some highly durable advanced materials developed for the international space station and other aeronautic purposes have the potential to be applied terrestrially for processes like carbon capture, according to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The agency’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, which conducts R&D work for spaceflight and other applications, is in “ongoing” talks with the Department of Energy and the National Energy Technology Laboratory to forge some sort of partnership that could help transition NASA-developed technologies to wider commercial use including carbon capture, said Robert Romero, capture manager at NASA Glenn. “If you talk about advanced energy and think about CO2 capture and what is needed achieve cost efficiencies, NASA might be able to provide a supporting role,” Romero said in an interview this week with GHG Monitor. “One of the things that NASA is uniquely capable of providing is advanced materials that can withstand extreme environments with very high or low temperatures given our work on the international space station.”
NASA and DOE-NETL are in the “preliminary” stages of developing some sort of working relationship, according to Romero, as employees of both departments try to gauge areas of potential overlap and collaboration. “We are embarking on developing a more detailed plan,” he said. So far, several DOE representatives have visited Glenn’s research facilities, and NASA officials are planning to tour DOE-NETL offices in the future, he said. While neither NASA nor DOE employees have flagged any specific NASA technologies that could be promising for CCS, that will be a future step once a relationship becomes more formalized, Romero said.
Presidential Memorandum Drives Collaboration
Public outreach and the commercial use of NASA technologies have always been a priority for NASA, and advanced energy seems to be a natural fit for public and private sector collaboration, Romero said. Also driving cooperation, he said, is a presidential memorandum for accelerating technology transfers and commercializing federal research issued by the White House in October. The memorandum calls for the heads of federal departments, agencies and national labs to help foster innovation and economic growth in American industries via increased technology transfers. In the memorandum, the Administration called for the creation of more local and regional public-private partnerships through 2017 that could help increase the transfer of invention disclosures, licenses issued on patents, cooperative R&D agreements, new products and self-sustaining spinoff companies created for such products.
Romero said that most NASA partnerships within the applied energy sector would generally center on a traditional ‘reimbursable agreements’ structure, with which NASA would make available some of its intellectual property, subject matter experts and test facilities and groups would reimburse them for the costs incurred during that process. However, Romero emphasized that agreements could also vary on a case-by-case basis. “We’ve got a unique opportunity here with advanced energy and carbon capture, so we’re looking to capitalize on that and benefit the economy in some way,” he said.
