West Virginia
West Virginia
West Virginia’s natural resources have long played a complex and critical role in America’s energy economy. ORNL’s partners in West Virginia include the National Energy Technology Laboratory and Ramaco Carbon, among others.
ORNL’s user facilities offer a diverse set of tools for experiments across a range of fields, including biology, materials and energy sciences, physics, engineering, and chemistry. Learn more about ORNL’s user facilities. Data reflects fiscal year 2020 except for scientific publications, which covers 2016–2020. Partner stories reflect work conducted from 2016 to present.
DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Morgantown is a full-service applied energy innovation center investigating energy technologies related to geological and environmental sciences, energy conversion, computational science, and more—all with the common goal of advancing energy and environmental technologies into the marketplace.
NETL and ORNL have collaborated to optimize coal gasifier operation through neutron imaging—an effort that could lead to more efficient energy production than that of conventional methods. The collaboration brings together NETL’s expertise in fossil energy and computational modeling with ORNL’s capabilities in neutron imaging.
NETL operates three sites in Albany, Oregon; Morgantown, West Virginia; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
ORNL and Ramaco Carbon are innovating ways to transform coal to advanced carbon products and materials. For example, ORNL researchers have created and tested two methods for transforming coal into the scarce mineral graphite to use in batteries for electric vehicles and grid energy storage. They are now scaling up the technology in partnership with Ramaco, which has metallurgical coal mines in West Virginia. ORNL is also working with the company to develop methods for manufacturing coal-derived carbon fiber with high surface area for use in industrial smokestack filters. This project utilizes expertise from the ORNL Carbon Fiber Technology Facility, DOE’s only designated user facility offering a customizable platform to validate new carbon fiber technologies at semi-production scale. Learn more about energy research at ORNL.
For more information, contact [email protected].
