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Concrete “battery” developed at MIT now packs 10 times the power

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Wednesday, October 1, 2025

Concrete already builds our world, and now it’s one step closer to powering it, too. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy. In other words, the concrete around us could one day double as giant “batteries.”As MIT researchers report in a new PNAS paper, optimized electrolytes and manufacturing processes have increased the energy storage capacity of the latest ec3 supercapacitors by an order of magnitude. In 2023, storing enough energy to meet the daily needs of the average home would have required about 45 cubic meters of ec3, roughly the amount of concrete used in a typical basement. Now, with the improved electrolyte, that same task can be achieved with about 5 cubic meters, the volume of a typical basement wall.“A key to the sustainability of concrete is the development of ‘multifunctional concrete,’ which integrates functionalities like this energy storage, self-healing, and carbon sequestration. Concrete is already the world’s most-used construction material, so why not take advantage of that scale to create other benefits?” asks Admir Masic, lead author of the new study, MIT Electron-Conducting Carbon-Cement-Based Materials Hub (EC³ Hub) co-director, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT.The improved energy density was made possible by a deeper understanding of how the nanocarbon black network inside ec3 functions and interacts with electrolytes. Using focused ion beams for the sequential removal of thin layers of the ec3 material, followed by high-resolution imaging of each slice with a scanning electron microscope (a technique called FIB-SEM tomography), the team across the EC³ Hub and MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub was able to reconstruct the conductive nanonetwork at the highest resolution yet. This approach allowed the team to discover that the network is essentially a fractal-like “web” that surrounds ec3 pores, which is what allows the electrolyte to infiltrate and for current to flow through the system. “Understanding how these materials ‘assemble’ themselves at the nanoscale is key to achieving these new functionalities,” adds Masic.Equipped with their new understanding of the nanonetwork, the team experimented with different electrolytes and their concentrations to see how they impacted energy storage density. As Damian Stefaniuk, first author and EC³ Hub research scientist, highlights, “we found that there is a wide range of electrolytes that could be viable candidates for ec3. This even includes seawater, which could make this a good material for use in coastal and marine applications, perhaps as support structures for offshore wind farms.”At the same time, the team streamlined the way they added electrolytes to the mix. Rather than curing ec3 electrodes and then soaking them in electrolyte, they added the electrolyte directly into the mixing water. Since electrolyte penetration was no longer a limitation, the team could cast thicker electrodes that stored more energy.The team achieved the greatest performance when they switched to organic electrolytes, especially those that combined quaternary ammonium salts — found in everyday products like disinfectants — with acetonitrile, a clear, conductive liquid often used in industry. A cubic meter of this version of ec3 — about the size of a refrigerator — can store over 2 kilowatt-hours of energy. That’s about enough to power an actual refrigerator for a day.While batteries maintain a higher energy density, ec3 can in principle be incorporated directly into a wide range of architectural elements — from slabs and walls to domes and vaults — and last as long as the structure itself.“The Ancient Romans made great advances in concrete construction. Massive structures like the Pantheon stand to this day without reinforcement. If we keep up their spirit of combining material science with architectural vision, we could be at the brink of a new architectural revolution with multifunctional concretes like ec3,” proposes Masic.Taking inspiration from Roman architecture, the team built a miniature ec3 arch to show how structural form and energy storage can work together. Operating at 9 volts, the arch supported its own weight and additional load while powering an LED light.However, something unique happened when the load on the arch increased: the light flickered. This is likely due to the way stress impacts electrical contacts or the distribution of charges. “There may be a kind of self-monitoring capacity here. If we think of an ec3 arch at architectural scale, its output may fluctuate when it’s impacted by a stressor like high winds. We may be able to use this as a signal of when and to what extent a structure is stressed, or monitor its overall health in real time,” envisions Masic.The latest developments in ec³ technology bring it a step closer to real-world scalability. It’s already been used to heat sidewalk slabs in Sapporo, Japan, due to its thermally conductive properties, representing a potential alternative to salting. “With these higher energy densities and demonstrated value across a broader application space, we now have a powerful and flexible tool that can help us address a wide range of persistent energy challenges,” explains Stefaniuk. “One of our biggest motivations was to help enable the renewable energy transition. Solar power, for example, has come a long way in terms of efficiency. However, it can only generate power when there’s enough sunlight. So, the question becomes: How do you meet your energy needs at night, or on cloudy days?”Franz-Josef Ulm, EC³ Hub co-director and CEE professor, continues the thread: “The answer is that you need a way to store and release energy. This has usually meant a battery, which often relies on scarce or harmful materials. We believe that ec3 is a viable substitute, letting our buildings and infrastructure meet our energy storage needs.” The team is working toward applications like parking spaces and roads that could charge electric vehicles, as well as homes that can operate fully off the grid.“What excites us most is that we’ve taken a material as ancient as concrete and shown that it can do something entirely new,” says James Weaver, a co-author on the paper who is an associate professor of design technology and materials science and engineering at Cornell University, as well as a former EC³ Hub researcher. “By combining modern nanoscience with an ancient building block of civilization, we’re opening a door to infrastructure that doesn’t just support our lives, it powers them.”

Improved carbon-cement supercapacitors could turn the concrete around us into massive energy storage systems.

Concrete already builds our world, and now it’s one step closer to powering it, too. Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black (with nanoscale particles), and electrolytes, electron-conducting carbon concrete (ec3, pronounced “e-c-cubed”) creates a conductive “nanonetwork” inside concrete that could enable everyday structures like walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy. In other words, the concrete around us could one day double as giant “batteries.”

As MIT researchers report in a new PNAS paper, optimized electrolytes and manufacturing processes have increased the energy storage capacity of the latest ec3 supercapacitors by an order of magnitude. In 2023, storing enough energy to meet the daily needs of the average home would have required about 45 cubic meters of ec3, roughly the amount of concrete used in a typical basement. Now, with the improved electrolyte, that same task can be achieved with about 5 cubic meters, the volume of a typical basement wall.

“A key to the sustainability of concrete is the development of ‘multifunctional concrete,’ which integrates functionalities like this energy storage, self-healing, and carbon sequestration. Concrete is already the world’s most-used construction material, so why not take advantage of that scale to create other benefits?” asks Admir Masic, lead author of the new study, MIT Electron-Conducting Carbon-Cement-Based Materials Hub (EC³ Hub) co-director, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at MIT.

The improved energy density was made possible by a deeper understanding of how the nanocarbon black network inside ec3 functions and interacts with electrolytes. Using focused ion beams for the sequential removal of thin layers of the ec3 material, followed by high-resolution imaging of each slice with a scanning electron microscope (a technique called FIB-SEM tomography), the team across the EC³ Hub and MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub was able to reconstruct the conductive nanonetwork at the highest resolution yet. This approach allowed the team to discover that the network is essentially a fractal-like “web” that surrounds ec3 pores, which is what allows the electrolyte to infiltrate and for current to flow through the system. 

“Understanding how these materials ‘assemble’ themselves at the nanoscale is key to achieving these new functionalities,” adds Masic.

Equipped with their new understanding of the nanonetwork, the team experimented with different electrolytes and their concentrations to see how they impacted energy storage density. As Damian Stefaniuk, first author and EC³ Hub research scientist, highlights, “we found that there is a wide range of electrolytes that could be viable candidates for ec3. This even includes seawater, which could make this a good material for use in coastal and marine applications, perhaps as support structures for offshore wind farms.”

At the same time, the team streamlined the way they added electrolytes to the mix. Rather than curing ec3 electrodes and then soaking them in electrolyte, they added the electrolyte directly into the mixing water. Since electrolyte penetration was no longer a limitation, the team could cast thicker electrodes that stored more energy.

The team achieved the greatest performance when they switched to organic electrolytes, especially those that combined quaternary ammonium salts — found in everyday products like disinfectants — with acetonitrile, a clear, conductive liquid often used in industry. A cubic meter of this version of ec3 — about the size of a refrigerator — can store over 2 kilowatt-hours of energy. That’s about enough to power an actual refrigerator for a day.

While batteries maintain a higher energy density, ec3 can in principle be incorporated directly into a wide range of architectural elements — from slabs and walls to domes and vaults — and last as long as the structure itself.

“The Ancient Romans made great advances in concrete construction. Massive structures like the Pantheon stand to this day without reinforcement. If we keep up their spirit of combining material science with architectural vision, we could be at the brink of a new architectural revolution with multifunctional concretes like ec3,” proposes Masic.

Taking inspiration from Roman architecture, the team built a miniature ec3 arch to show how structural form and energy storage can work together. Operating at 9 volts, the arch supported its own weight and additional load while powering an LED light.

However, something unique happened when the load on the arch increased: the light flickered. This is likely due to the way stress impacts electrical contacts or the distribution of charges. “There may be a kind of self-monitoring capacity here. If we think of an ec3 arch at architectural scale, its output may fluctuate when it’s impacted by a stressor like high winds. We may be able to use this as a signal of when and to what extent a structure is stressed, or monitor its overall health in real time,” envisions Masic.

The latest developments in ec³ technology bring it a step closer to real-world scalability. It’s already been used to heat sidewalk slabs in Sapporo, Japan, due to its thermally conductive properties, representing a potential alternative to salting. “With these higher energy densities and demonstrated value across a broader application space, we now have a powerful and flexible tool that can help us address a wide range of persistent energy challenges,” explains Stefaniuk. “One of our biggest motivations was to help enable the renewable energy transition. Solar power, for example, has come a long way in terms of efficiency. However, it can only generate power when there’s enough sunlight. So, the question becomes: How do you meet your energy needs at night, or on cloudy days?”

Franz-Josef Ulm, EC³ Hub co-director and CEE professor, continues the thread: “The answer is that you need a way to store and release energy. This has usually meant a battery, which often relies on scarce or harmful materials. We believe that ec3 is a viable substitute, letting our buildings and infrastructure meet our energy storage needs.” The team is working toward applications like parking spaces and roads that could charge electric vehicles, as well as homes that can operate fully off the grid.

“What excites us most is that we’ve taken a material as ancient as concrete and shown that it can do something entirely new,” says James Weaver, a co-author on the paper who is an associate professor of design technology and materials science and engineering at Cornell University, as well as a former EC³ Hub researcher. “By combining modern nanoscience with an ancient building block of civilization, we’re opening a door to infrastructure that doesn’t just support our lives, it powers them.”

Read the full story here.
Photos courtesy of

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California needs biomass energy to meet its wildfire goals. Its projects keep going South

California needs to burn vegetation both for wildfire mitigation and to generate power. So why do biomass energy projects keep leaving the state?

Arbor Energy is, essentially, a poster child of the kind of biomass energy project California keeps saying it wants.The state’s goal is to reduce wildfire risk on 1 million acres of wildlands every year, including by thinning overgrown forests, which is expected to generate roughly 10 million tons of wood waste annually. Arbor hopes to take that waste, blast it through a “vegetarian rocket engine” to produce energy, then sequester all of the carbon the process would generate underground.California has billed Arbor — and the handful of other similarly aimed projects it’s financed — as a win-win-win: wildfire mitigation, clean energy and carbon sequestration all in one.Yet, after Arbor initially won state financial backing for a pilot project in Placer County, the El Segundo-based company’s California ambitions fell through, like many biomass projects before it.Instead, it’s heading to Louisiana.California, biomass energy advocates say, has struggled to get past its distrust of the technology, given traditional biomass’ checkered past of clear-cutting forests and polluting poorer communities. Further, the state’s strict permitting requirements have given residents tremendous power to veto projects and created regulatory headaches.But many environmental groups argue it’s an example of California’s environmental and health protections actually working. If not done carefully, bioenergy projects run the risk of emitting carbon — not sequestering it — and polluting communities already grappling with some of the state’s dirtiest air. “When you look at biomass facilities across California — and we’ve done Public Records Act requests to look at emissions, violations and exceedances ... the reality is that we’re not in some kind of idealized pen-and-paper drawing of what the equipment does,” said Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “In the real world, there are just too many problems with failures and faults in the equipment.”There are simpler and safer uses for this wood waste, these critics say: fertilizer for agriculture, wood chips and mulch. It may not provide carbon-negative energy but comes with none of the risks of bioenergy projects, they say. The Center for Biological Diversity and others advocate for a “hands-off” approach to California’s forests and urge management of the wildfire crisis through home hardening and evacuation planning alone. But fire and ecology experts say more than a century of fire suppression have made that unrealistic.However, the sweeping forest-thinning projects these experts say are needed will cost billions, and so the state needs every source of funding it can get. “Our bottleneck right now is, how do we pay for treating a million acres a year?” said Deputy Chief John McCarthy of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, who oversees the agency’s wood products and bioenergy program.In theory, the class of next-generation biomass energy proposals popping up across California could help fund this work.“California has an incredible opportunity,” said Arbor chief executive and co-founder Brad Hartwig. With the state’s leftover biomass from forest thinning, “we could make it basically the leader in carbon removal in the world.”A lot of wood with nowhere to goBiomass energy first took off in California in the 1980s after small pioneering plants at sawmills and food-processing facilities proved successful and the state’s utilities began offering favorable contracts for energy sources they deemed “renewable” — a category that included biomass. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, the state had more than 60 operating biomass plants, providing up to 9% of the state’s residential power. Researchers estimate the industry supported about 60,000 acres of forest treatment to reduce wildfire risk per year at the time. But biomass energy’s heyday was short-lived.In 1994, the California Public Utilities Commission shifted the state’s emphasis away from creating a renewable and diverse energy mix and toward simply buying the cheapest possible power.Biomass — an inherently more expensive endeavor — struggled. Many plants took buyouts to shut down early. Despite California’s repeated attempts to revitalize the industry, the number of biomass plants continued to dwindle.Today, only 23 biomass plants remain in operation, according to the industry advocate group California Biomass Energy Alliance. The state Energy Commission expects the number to continue declining because of aging infrastructure and a poor bioenergy market. California’s forest and wildfire leadership are trying to change that.In 2021, Gov. Gavin Newsom created a task force to address California’s growing wildfire crisis. After convening the state’s top wildfire and forest scientists, the task force quickly came to a daunting conclusion: The more than a century of fire suppression in California’s forests — especially in the Sierra Nevada — had dramatically increased their density, providing fires with ample fuel to explode into raging beasts.To solve it, the state needed to rapidly remove that extra biomass on hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of acres of wildlands every year through a combination of prescribed burns, rehabilitation of burned areas and mechanically thinning the forest.McCarthy estimated treating a single acre of land could cost $2,000 to $3,000. At a million acres a year, that’s $2 billion to $3 billion annually.“Where is that going to come from?” McCarthy said. “Grants — maybe $200 million … 10% of the whole thing. So, we need markets. We need some sort of way to pay for this stuff and in a nontraditional way.”McCarthy believes bioenergy is one of those ways — essentially, by selling the least valuable, borderline unusable vegetation from the forest floor. You can’t build a house with pine cones, needles and twigs, but you can power a bioenergy plant.However, while biomass energy has surged in Southern states such as Georgia, projects in California have struggled to get off the ground.In 2022, a bid by Chevron, Microsoft and the oil-drilling technology company Schlumberger to revive a traditional biomass plant near Fresno and affix carbon capture to it fell through after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requested the project withdraw its permit application. Environmental groups including the Center for Biological Diversity and residents in nearby Mendota opposed the project.This year, a sweeping effort supported by rural Northern California counties to process more than 1 million tons of biomass a year into wood pellets and ship them to European bioenergy plants (with no carbon capture involved) in effect died after facing pushback from watch groups that feared the project, led by Golden State Natural Resources, would harm forests, and environmental justice groups that worried processing facilities at the Port of Stockton would worsen the air quality in one of the state’s most polluted communities.Arbor believed its fate would be different. Bioenergy from the ground upBefore founding Arbor, Hartwig served in the California Air National Guard for six years and on a Marin County search and rescue team. He now recalls a common refrain on the job: “There is no rescue in fire. It’s all search,” Hartwig said. “It’s looking for bodies — not even bodies, it’s teeth and bones.”In 2022, he started Arbor, with the idea of taking a different approach to bioenergy than the biomass plants shuttering across California.To understand Arbor’s innovation, start with coal plants, which burn fossil fuels to heat up water and produce steam that turns a turbine to generate electricity. Traditional biomass plants work essentially the same but replace coal with vegetation as the fuel. Typically, the smoke from the vegetation burning is simply released into the air. Small detail of the 16,000-pound proof-of-concept system being tested by Arbor that will burn biomass, capture carbon dioxide and generate electricity. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times) Arbor’s solution is more like a tree-powered rocket engine.The company can utilize virtually any form of biomass, from wood to sticks to pine needles and brush. Arbor heats it to extreme temperatures and deprives it of enough oxygen to make the biomass fully combust. The organic waste separates into a flammable gas — made of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen — and a small amount of solid waste.The machine then combusts the gas at extreme temperatures and pressures, which then accelerates a turbine at much higher rates than typical biomass plants. The resulting carbon dioxide exhaust is then sequestered underground. Arbor portrays its solution as a flexible, carbon-negative and clean device: It can operate anywhere with a hookup for carbon sequestration. Multiple units can work together for extra power. All of the carbon in the trees and twigs the machine ingests ends up in the ground — not back in the air.But biomass watchdogs warn previous attempts at technology like Arbor’s have fallen short.This biomass process creates a dry, flaky ash mainly composed of minerals — essentially everything in the original biomass that wasn’t “bio” — that can include heavy metals that the dead plants sucked up from the air or soil. If agricultural or construction waste is used, it can include nasty chemicals from wood treatments and pesticides.Arbor plans — at least initially — on using woody biomass directly from the forest, which typically contains less of these dangerous ash chemicals.Turning wood waste into gas also generates a thick, black tar composed of volatile organic compounds — which are also common contaminants following wildfires. The company says its gasification process uses high enough temperatures to break down the troublesome tar, but researchers say tar is an inevitable byproduct of this process. Grant Niccum, left, Arbor lead systems engineer and Kevin Saboda, systems engineer, at the company‘s test site in San Bernardino. Biomass is fed into this component and then compressed to 100 times atmospheric pressure and burned to create a synthetic gas. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times) Watchdogs also caution that the math to determine whether bioenergy projects sequester or release carbon is complicated and finicky.“Biomass is tricky, and there’s a million exceptions to every rule that need to be accounted for,” said Zeke Hausfather, climate research lead with Frontier Climate, which vets carbon capture projects such as Arbor’s and connects them with companies interested in buying carbon credits. “There are examples where we have found a project that actually works on the carbon accounting math, but we didn’t want to do it because it was touching Canadian boreal forest that’s old-growth forest.”Frontier Climate, along with the company Isometric, audits Arbor’s technology and operations. However, critics note that because both companies ultimately support the sale of carbon credits, their assessments may be biased.At worst, biomass projects can decimate forests and release their stored carbon into the atmosphere. Arbor hopes, instead, to be a best-case scenario: improving — or at least maintaining — forest health and stuffing carbon underground.When it all goes SouthArbor had initially planned to build a proof of concept in Placer County. To do it, Arbor won $2 million through McCarthy’s Cal Fire program and $500,000 through a state Department of Conservation program in 2023.But as California fell into a deficit in 2023, state funding dried up. So Arbor turned to private investors. In September 2024, Arbor reached an agreement with Microsoft in which the technology company would buy carbon credits backed by Arbor’s sequestration. In July of this year, the company announced a $41-million deal (well over 15 times the funding it ever received from California) with Frontier Climate, whose carbon credit buyers include Google, the online payment company Stripe and Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook.To fulfill the credits, it would build its first commercial facility near Lake Charles, La., in part powering nearby data centers.“We were very excited about Arbor,” McCarthy said. “They pretty much walked away from their grant and said they’re not going to do this in California. … We were disappointed in that.”But for Arbor, relying on the state was no longer feasible.“We can’t rely on California for the money to develop the technology and deploy the initial systems,” said Hartwig, standing in Arbor’s plant-covered El Segundo office. “For a lot of reasons, it makes sense to go test the machine, improve the technology in the market elsewhere before we actually get to do deployments in California, which is a much more difficult permitting and regulatory environment.” Rigger Arturo Hernandez, left, and systems engineer Kevin Saboda secure Arbor’s proof-of-concept system in the company’s San Bernardino test site after its journey from Arbor’s headquarters in El Segundo. The steel frame was welded in Texas while the valves, tubing and other hardware were installed in El Segundo. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times) It’s not the first next-generation biomass company based in California to build elsewhere. San Francisco-based Charm Industrial, whose technology doesn’t involve energy generation, began its sequestration efforts in the Midwest and plans to expand into Louisiana.The American South has less stringent logging and environmental regulations, which has led biomass energy projects to flock to the area: In 2024, about 2.3% of the South’s energy came from woody biomass — up from 2% in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Meanwhile, that number on the West Coast was only 1.2%, continuing on its slow decline. And, unlike in the West, companies aiming to create wood pellets to ship abroad have proliferated in the South. In 2024, the U.S. produced more than 10.7 million tons of biomass pellets; 82% of which was exported. That’s up from virtually zero in 2000. The vast majority of the biomass pellets produced last year — 84% — was from the South. Watchdogs warn that this lack of guardrails has allowed the biomass industry to harm the South’s forests, pollute poor communities living near biomass facilities and fall short of its climate claims.Over the last five years, Drax — a company that harvests and exports wood pellets and was working with Golden State Natural Resources — has had to pay Louisiana and Mississippi a combined $5 million for violating air pollution laws. Residents living next to biomass plants, like Drax’s, say the operations have worsened asthma and routinely leave a film of dust on their cars.But operating a traditional biomass facility or shipping wood pellets to Europe wasn’t Arbor’s founding goal — albeit powering data centers in the American South wasn’t exactly either.Hartwig, who grew up in the Golden State, hopes Arbor’s technology can someday return to California to help finance the solution for the wildfire crisis he spent so many years facing head-on.“We’ve got an interest in Arkansas, in Texas, all the way up to Minnesota,” Hartwig said. “Eventually, we’d like to come back to California.”

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Agriculture
Climate

Trump administration spending $625m to revive dying coal industry

White House allocating 13.1m acres of public land to coal mining, which has been on rapid decline over past 30 yearsThe White House will open 13.1m acres (5.3m hectares) of public land to coal mining while providing $625m for coal-fired power plants, the Trump administration has announced.The efforts came as part of a suite of initiatives from the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, and Environmental Protection Agency, aimed at reviving the flagging coal sector. Coal, the most polluting and costly fossil fuel, has been on a rapid decline over the past 30 years, with the US halving its production between 2008 and 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Continue reading...

The White House will open 13.1m acres (5.3m hectares) of public land to coal mining while providing $625m for coal-fired power plants, the Trump administration has announced.The efforts came as part of a suite of initiatives from the Department of the Interior, Department of Energy, and Environmental Protection Agency, aimed at reviving the flagging coal sector. Coal, the most polluting and costly fossil fuel, has been on a rapid decline over the past 30 years, with the US halving its production between 2008 and 2023, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).“This is an industry that matters to our country,” interior secretary Doug Burgum said in a livestreamed press conference on Monday morning, alongside representatives from the other two departments. “It matters to the world, and it’s going to continue to matter for a long time.”Coal plants provided about 15% of US electricity in 2024 – a steep fall from 50% in 2000 – the EIA found, with the growth of gas and green power displacing its use. Last year, wind and solar produced more electricity than coal in the US for the first time in history, according to the International Energy Agency, which predicts that could happen at the global level by the end of 2026.Despite its dwindling role, Trump has made the reviving the coal sector a priority of his second term amid increasing energy demand due to the proliferation of artificial intelligence data centers.“The Trump administration is hell-bent on supporting the oldest, dirtiest energy source. It’s handing our hard-earned tax dollars over to the owners of coal plants that cost more to run than new, clean energy,” said Amanda Levin, director of policy analysis at the national environmental non-profit Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is a colossal waste of our money at a time when the federal government should be spurring along the new energy sources that can power the AI boom and help bring down electricity bills for struggling families.”The administration’s new $625m investment includes $350m to “modernize” coal plants, $175m for coal projects it claims will provide affordable and reliable energy to rural communities, and $50m to upgrade wastewater management systems to extend the lifespan of coal plants.The efforts follow previous coal-focused initiatives from the Trump administration, which has greenlit mining leases while fast-tracking mining permits. It has also prolonged the life of some coal plants, exempted some coal plants from EPA rules, and falsely claimed that emissions from those plants are “not significant”.The moves have sparked outrage from environmental advocates who note that coal pollution has been linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths across the past two decades. One study estimated that emissions from coal costs Americans $13-$26bn a year in additional ER visits, strokes and cardiac events, and a greater prevalence and severity of childhood asthma events.

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About $675 million earmarked for Texas projects is in limbo as Congress careens toward shutdown

Texas’ congressional delegation obtained tentative funding for infrastructure improvements, university research and other initiatives, but the nearly 350 earmarks are all in jeopardy.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. The Texas congressional delegation has secured about $675 million to pay for community projects across the state in federal spending bills for the next fiscal year. But the funds, informally known as earmarks, are all in jeopardy amid the threat of a government shutdown. Lawmakers returned to their districts last year empty-handed when Congress left earmarks out of stopgap legislation used to fund the government for the current fiscal year, which ends Tuesday. Now, local governments, universities and nonprofits in the state stand to lose out on millions of dollars for infrastructure improvements, research and more if both parties in Congress are unable to resolve an impasse that has stalled the spending package that includes the earmarks. Dallas Area Rapid Transit could miss out on the $250,000 secured by Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, to modernize the Ledbetter Light Rail Station. Amarillo could end up without the $1.75 million Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Amarillo, acquired to help design a new wastewater treatment facility in the city. And the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Houston may lose out on $350,000 sought by Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Richmond, for facility repairs and upgrades that Nehls said could otherwise be used for youth programs. These Texas projects are just a few of the ones lawmakers are fighting for as they near a government funding deadline. Most of the funding would be administered through the following agencies: Department of Housing and Urban Development: Nearly $230 million would pay for facility renovations, community centers, trail improvements and other infrastructure and community projects. Department of Transportation: Texas lawmakers secured about $120 million for projects to bolster public transportation, highways, airports and more. Department of Justice: About $80 million would be administered by the Justice Department for local law enforcement agencies and nonprofits. Environmental Protection Agency: About $54 million would go toward water treatment projects and efforts to deliver clean drinking water. Army Corps of Engineers: Nearly $50 million would pay for construction, operation and maintenance on dams, waterways and ship channels. Department of Commerce: Universities and other research institutions in Texas would collectively receive about $42 million through the Commerce Department. In all, the House’s package of a dozen appropriation bills contains nearly $8 billion in earmarks, with requests for Texas making up about 8% of these funds. Out of Texas’ 37 representatives in the House, 33 asked for earmark funding, with each requester receiving money for at least one community project. Republican Reps. Pat Fallon of Sherman, Craig Goldman of Fort Worth, Chip Roy of Austin and Keith Self of McKinney were the four who skipped out on earmark requests. On the Senate side, Sen. John Cornyn and Sen. Ted Cruz also abstained from submitting requests for “congressionally directed spending” — the term for earmarks in the upper chamber. ⚠️ TIME’S ALMOST UP ⚠️Independent Texas journalism is worth fighting for. Join us in this final push. DONATE TODAY Both senators have previously spoken out against earmarks and advocated to strip them from appropriations bills. Republican lawmakers previously banned the practice after they won control of Congress in 2010, but Democrats revived it in 2021. Cornyn pushed back against the move, calling earmarks “a playground for quid pro quo” that was adding to the country’s mounting debt. When earmarks first returned to Congress, most Texas Republicans did not request funding. Roy even led a group of 18 House Republicans in issuing a letter pledging to “take a stand against legislative bribery” by not requesting earmark money. But in the years since 2021, the majority of Texas Republicans in the House have embraced the practice. About 75% of funds earmarked for Texas in House appropriations bills for the 2026 fiscal year were secured by Republicans, according to an analysis by The Texas Tribune. The five Texans who are poised to rake in the most earmarked funds are all Republicans: Ellzey, Carter and Gonzales each serve on the House Appropriations Committee, the powerful panel that oversees federal spending bills. Ellzey is looking to bring home $50 million to renovate a U.S. Marine Corps facility in Fort Worth — the most expensive earmark for Texas. He’s also poised to secure funds to fix water infrastructure issues in Glenn Heights, a small town at the southern edge of Dallas County, if the spending package makes it through Congress. “That’s something that they really need,” Ellzey said in an interview with The Texas Tribune. “I’m very proud of the requests that I made.” Ellzey said he hopes Congress avoids passing what’s known as a continuing resolution — a short-term funding bill to keep the government open — and instead gets it together to approve the dozen appropriations bills that include the local funding. Other notable earmarks include waterway improvements such as the more than $29 million that Babin and Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Victoria, hope to secure for operations and maintenance work on the Houston, Corpus Christi and Matagorda ship channels, which export massive amounts of crude oil and other energy products. All 12 Democrats from Texas secured funding for at least one project in the appropriations bill drafts. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, D-Houston, was the state’s top Democratic earmarker, with nearly $19 million largely devoted to economic development projects, flood and drainage improvements and local law enforcement programs. Among the funds she has tentatively secured is a $1 million allotment to develop a “space and planetary science” program at Alief Independent School District in collaboration with Rice University, and more than $3 million to renovate Houston’s Metropolitan Multiservice Center for people with disabilities. Rep. Julie Johnson, a Democrat from Farmers Branch who is in line to bring more than $15 million back to her district, said she is thrilled about the potential to fund health care and transportation projects in North Texas, but remains worried that the earmarks could become casualties of the budget negotiation deadlock. “We have a lot of disagreements in this budget right now,” she said. “So all this funding is at risk.” Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. Shape the future of Texas at the 15th annual Texas Tribune Festival, happening Nov. 13–15 in downtown Austin! We bring together Texas’ most inspiring thinkers, leaders and innovators to discuss the issues that matter to you. Get tickets now and join us this November. TribFest 2025 is presented by JPMorganChase.

Energy
Government
Health

Technique makes complex 3D printed parts more reliable

New research enables computer designs to incorporate the limitations of 3D printers, to better control materials’ performance in aerospace, medical, and other applications.

People are increasingly turning to software to design complex material structures like airplane wings and medical implants. But as design models become more capable, our fabrication techniques haven’t kept up. Even 3D printers struggle to reliably produce the precise designs created by algorithms. The problem has led to a disconnect between the ways a material is expected to perform and how it actually works.Now, MIT researchers have created a way for models to account for 3D printing’s limitations during the design process. In experiments, they showed their approach could be used to make materials that perform much more closely to the way they’re intended to.“If you don’t account for these limitations, printers can either over- or under-deposit material by quite a lot, so your part becomes heavier or lighter than intended. It can also over- or underestimate the material performance significantly,” says Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Josephine Carstensen. “With our technique, you know what you’re getting in terms of performance because the numerical model and experimental results align very well.”The approach is described in the journal Materials and Design, in an open-access paper co-authored by Carstensen and PhD student Hajin Kim-Tackowiak.Matching theory with realityOver the last decade, new design and fabrication technologies have transformed the way things are made, especially in industries like aerospace, automotive, and biomedical engineering, where materials must reach precise weight-to-strength ratios and other performance thresholds. In particular, 3D printing allows materials to be made with more complex internal structures.“3D printing processes generally give us more flexibility because we don’t have to come up with forms or molds for things that would be made through more traditional means like injection molding,” Kim-Tackowiak explains.As 3D printing has made production more precise, so have methods for designing complex material structures. One of the most advanced computational design techniques is known as topology optimization. Topology optimization has been used to generate new and often surprising material structures that can outperform conventional designs, in some cases approaching the theoretical limits of certain performance thresholds. It is currently being used to design materials with optimized stiffness and strength, maximized energy absorption, fluid permeability, and more.But topology optimization often creates designs at extremely fine scales that 3D printers have struggled to reliably reproduce. The problem is the size of the print head that extrudes the material. If the design specifies a layer to be 0.5 millimeters thick, for instance, and the print head is only capable of extruding 1-millimeter-thick layers, the final design will be warped and imprecise.Another problem has to do with the way 3D printers create parts, with a print head extruding a thin bead of material as it glides across the printing area, gradually building parts layer by layer. That can cause weak bonding between layers, making the part more prone to separation or failure.The researchers sought to address the disconnect between expected and actual properties of materials that arise from those limitations.“We thought, ‘We know these limitations in the beginning, and the field has gotten better at quantifying these limitations, so we might as well design from the get-go with that in mind,” Kim-Tackowiak says.In previous work, Carstensen developed an algorithm that embedded information about the print nozzle size into design algorithms for beam structures. For this paper, the researchers built off that approach to incorporate the direction of the print head and the corresponding impact of weak bonding between layers. They also made it work with more complex, porous structures that can have extremely elastic properties.The approach allows users to add variables to the design algorithms that account for the center of the bead being extruded from a print head and the exact location of the weaker bonding region between layers. The approach also automatically dictates the path the print head should take during production.The researchers used their technique to create a series of repeating 2D designs with various sizes of hollow pores, or densities. They compared those creations to materials made using traditional topology optimization designs of the same densities.In tests, the traditionally designed materials deviated from their intended mechanical performance more than materials designed using the researchers’ new technique at material densities under 70 percent. The researchers also found that conventional designs consistently over-deposited material during fabrication. Overall, the researchers’ approach led to parts with more reliable performance at most densities.“One of the challenges of topology optimization has been that you need a lot of expertise to get good results, so that once you take the designs off the computer, the materials behave the way you thought they would,” Carstensen says. “We’re trying to make it easy to get these high-fidelity products.”Scaling a new design approachThe researchers believe this is the first time a design technique has accounted for both the print head size and weak bonding between layers.“When you design something, you should use as much context as possible,” Kim-Tackowiak says. “It was rewarding to see that putting more context into the design process makes your final materials more accurate. It means there are fewer surprises. Especially when we’re putting so much more computational resources into these designs, it’s nice to see we can correlate what comes out of the computer with what comes out of the production process.”In future work, the researchers hope to improve their method for higher material densities and for different kinds of materials like cement and ceramics. Still, they said their approach offered an improvement over existing techniques, which often require experienced 3D printing specialists to help account for the limitations of the machines and materials.“It was cool to see that just by putting in the size of your deposition and the bonding property values, you get designs that would have required the consultation of somebody who’s worked in the space for years,” Kim-Tackowiak says.The researchers say the work paves the way to design with more materials.“We’d like to see this enable the use of materials that people have disregarded because printing with them has led to issues,” Kim-Tackowiak says. “Now we can leverage those properties or work with those quirks as opposed to just not using all the material options we have at our disposal.”

Energy
Science

Energy Department plans to claw back $13B in green funds

The Energy Department is planning to claw back $13 billion in unspent climate funds, it announced Wednesday. In a press release, the department said that it plans to "return more than $13 billion in unobligated funds initially appropriated to advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda." The press release did not specify exactly where the...

The Energy Department is planning to claw back $13 billion in unspent climate funds, it announced Wednesday.  In a press release, the department said that it plans to "return more than $13 billion in unobligated funds initially appropriated to advance the previous Administration’s wasteful Green New Scam agenda." The press release did not specify exactly where the money would have otherwise gone or what it will be used for now, if anything. Spokespeople for the Energy Department did not immediately respond to The Hill's request for additional information. Asked about the money during the New York Times's Climate Forward event on Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the funds "hadn't been assigned to projects yet" but that they were aimed at subsidizing more wind and solar energy, as well as electric vehicles.  The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to curtail spending on renewable energy — and set up barriers that hamper its deployment — while trying to expedite fossil fuels and nuclear power.  The Energy Department has made several attempts to cut climate spending, including previous funding recissions.  The Environmental Protection Agency has separately sought to rescind billions of its own climate spending that was issued under the Biden administration. 

Energy
Climate
Waste

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Crisis
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