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NETL earns R&D 100 awards

DOE lab earns four awards for technologies made to remove chemicals from flue gases, help engineers design power plants and detect CO2 leaks.

23 July 2009– Technologies developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) won four 2009 R&D 100 Awards.
The awards push the number of R&D 100 Awards that NETL has won to more than 30 since 2000.

NETL’s winning technologies are the following:


  • Clay-liquid CO2 removal sorbent – NETL developed and patented a low-cost, solid-state sorbent that removes CO2 from power plant flue gas and other gases.


  • Thief process for the removal of mercury from flue gas – The thief process extracts partially burned coal from a pulverized coal-fired combustor using a suction pipe, or “thief,” and injects the resulting sorbent into the flue gas to capture the mercury. The process greatly reduces the costs of removing mercury by using already existing coal rather than expensive activated carbon. The process can prevent 90 percent of the mercury from reaching the atmosphere. The process was licensed to Nalco Mobotec of Orinda, Calif., which began marketing it in December 2008.


  • Virtual Engineering Process Simulator Interface–The VE-PSI software is designed to give engineers the ability to design and optimize power plants within a 3-D environment. Engineering data from process simulation, computational fluid dynamics, and computer-aided design can be integrated and analyzed within a virtual power plant. VE-PSI lets engineers create virtual prototypes of new plant designs and improve existing designs without spending time and materials on prototypes. Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa and Reaction Engineering International in Salt Lake City helped to develop the software.


  • SEQURETM Tracer Technology–The patent-pending technology uses perfluorocarbon tracers, or PFTs, to ultra-sensitively detect CO2 leakage from geological storage reservoirs. Since the capture and permanent storage of CO2 is important in addressing greenhouse gas emissions, the Office of Fossil Energy must have technology available to verify that CO2 is not leaking from deep storage reservoirs.