Research
Natural gas research at Stanford spans business, engineering, science, legal, and other social science disciplines. The Natural Gas Initiative serves as the Stanford’s center for natural gas and the Stanford’s research portfolio across campus. Research is funded by the members and supporters of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative, as well as by a range of contracts, grants, and gifts made directly to Stanford researchers, centers, and departments.
The Stanford Natural Gas Initiative organizes its research portfolio into seven focus areas that house the bulk of our current work and organizational capability. There is a tremendous amount of overlap and synergy in the work and people involved in each focus area. For example, policy aspects of many of these focus areas draw from the same economists, policy experts, and legal scholars as our “Global Markets and Governance” focus area. Each focus area integrates the applicable science, engineering, business, and policy aspects of the program.
Seed Grant Projects
Seed research is intended to fund new exploratory research or research that does not clearly fit into one of the defined focus areas. Seed research is an important mechanism to encourage involvement in natural gas research by Stanford investigators and to maintain and develop Stanford's organizational capability in gas research.
- Natural Gas Leak Detection, Quantification, and Mitigation Focus Area (Rob Jackson, Adam Brandt)
- Development of Microbial Cell Factories for Methane-based Industrial Biotechnology (Craig Criddle, Robert Waymouth, Nils Averesch)
- Energy Focus Area (Frank Wolak, Mark Thurber)
- Global Markets and Governance (Frank Wolak, Mark Thurber)
- Integration of Gas and Renewables (Frank Wolak, Mark Thurber)
- Methane Conversion Focus Area (Matteo Cargnello, Thomas Jaramillo, Xiaolin Zheng)
- "Natural H2" Subsurface Solutions (Tony Kovscek, Tapan Mukerji)
- Prevention of Hydrogen Embrittlement in Pipeline Alloys (Wendy Gu)
- Satellite Technology for Methane Emissions Detection (Adam Brandt)