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.

In addition to these focus areas, the Natural Gas Initiative operates a seed grant program to encourage new work on natural gas by Stanford researchers and strategic funding to support important work that does not closely fit into any of our focus areas.

Research Program: Seed Research 

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 an develop Stanford organizational capability in gas research.