Stanford Energy Student Lectures – High-temp hydrogen catalysts and induced seismicity management

Join us as grad student/postdoc speakers from various technical areas deliver short and accessible presentations about their innovative clean energy research. Learn more about cutting-edge science and the most recent breakthroughs in areas such as renewables, energy conversion materials and devices, catalysis, and decarbonization from the researchers themselves!

Refreshments will be provided starting at 2:45 pm. Share your feedback on the speakers for a chance to win a Coupa gift card!

Speaker Topics:

Adam Potter - Breaking properties tradeoffs for the next generation of high-temperature hydrogen catalysts

Abstract:

Hydrogen is a carbon-free fuel with the potential to replace fossil fuels in industries such as transportation, metallurgy, fertilizer production, and sustainable fuels. Electrolyzers, devices that produce hydrogen from water using electricity, offer a pathway to zero-emission hydrogen production anywhere in the world, but they must improve both efficiency and durability to become economically competitive. High-temperature steam electrolysis is currently the most energy-efficient hydrogen production method known, but operating at temperatures up to 800°C requires advanced electrode materials that can maintain high performance while resisting long-term degradation.

Discovering improved materials has been a slow process because researchers must simultaneously optimize several tightly connected properties, where improving one often worsens another. For example, increasing ionic conductivity can improve device performance but often reduces mechanical stability, leading to cracking and failure over time. As the field has advanced, many of these tradeoffs have been linked to fundamental physical mechanisms.

My research focuses on high-entropy materials, which mix five or more elements in a single crystal site, creating unexpected physical effects that can break the expected property tradeoffs. My talk will focus on how key material properties enable affordable hydrogen production, the physics underlying their tradeoffs, and the new mechanisms we have discovered in high-entropy materials that undermine these tradeoffs. 

Speaker bio:

Adam Potter is a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford University, working in the Z-Energy Lab under Prof. Xiaolin Zheng where he studies advanced materials for clean energy technologies. His research focuses on designing more efficient and durable oxide electrode materials for high-temperature fuel cells and electrolyzers by testing key material properties, discovering trends with data modeling, and determining the underlying physical mechanism with machine-learning accelerated simulations. Adam’s work aims to accelerate the discovery of next-generation tunable materials, particularly for high-temperature energy technologies. He earned his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Energy Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

 

Taeho Kim - Controlling Earthquakes and Fractures for Next-Generation Geothermal Energy

Abstract:

At a depth of 6–7 km, the subsurface of the contiguous United States holds enough geothermal heat to power the entire nation. Unlike solar and wind, geothermal energy delivers consistent, near-zero-emissions baseload power that is insensitive to daily and seasonal climate variations, at a fraction of the land footprint. Whether we can safely tap this immense resource depends on our ability to reliably predict and control the growth of subsurface fractures. Conventionally, fractures and pre-existing faults have been avoided due to earthquake risk and the inability to monitor deformation underground. Recent advances in earthquake science and fiber optic seismic monitoring now enable us to seriously pursue next-generation geothermal systems. In this presentation, I argue for a paradigm shift in our perspective on pre-existing faults to unlock geothermal energy at scale: from treating them as a liability to recognizing them as a central design variable. I present the theoretical models, simulations, and field analyses that are needed, including a recent analysis of the largest enhanced geothermal system (EGS) in the world. The analysis suggests that earthquake-enhanced geothermal systems may already exist, and that we can learn to engineer them deliberately, setting up geothermal as a cornerstone of a decarbonized grid. 

Speaker bio:

Taeho Kim is a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University in the Department of Energy Science & Engineering, working with Professor Eric Dunham in the Department of Geophysics. His research focuses on developing numerical simulations of enhanced geothermal systems, with an emphasis on the interactions between hydraulic fractures, pre-existing faults, and fluid migration. He also works with Professor Hamdi Tchelepi on developing theoretical and computational models of geomechanics and multiphase flow in the context of geological carbon sequestration. 

Prior to Stanford, he received his B.S. in Civil Engineering from the University of Michigan and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Applied Mechanics from Caltech. His doctoral thesis, Modeling Frictional Processes in the Presence of Fluids: From Earthquakes in the Laboratory to Induced Seismicity in Geothermal Reservoirs, received the Demetriades Award for Outstanding Thesis in Seismo-Engineering, Prediction, and Protection. 

He currently serves as co-leader of the Southern California Earthquake Center's (SCEC) initiative on Advancing Simulations of Earthquakes and Aseismic Slip, where he leads community efforts to develop numerical benchmark problems for fault slip coupled with pressure diffusion driven by subsurface fluid injection.