The Mercer Formation in the Northern Appalachian Basin has long been mined in central Pennsylvania for its coal and claystone deposits. Early investigations by the U.S. Geological Survey also documented substantial lithium (Li) enrichment in the claystones, but the origin and distribution of it remains poorly constrained. Integration of new and published sedimentological, paleontological, and geochemical data indicates that the formation accumulated in a tropical floodplain within an ancient river-delta system.
Past Events: Penn State Energy and Environment Calendar Archive
You're viewing an archived collection of past energy and environment events from around Penn State and beyond. Please visit our Event Calendar to view current and upcoming events.
Join Sustain Penn State for its traditional end-of-semester celebration of student sustainability work with the Fall 2025 Campus & Community Sustainability Expo. See student poster presentations about their projects from the semester working in partnership with Pennsylvania communities on applied sustainability research. Meet community partners and faculty sponsors. Hear from the keynote speaker, new Penn State provost Fotis Sotiropoulos. Enjoy free refreshments. Celebrate the community advancing sustainability across the Commonwealth.
Join Penn State Extension for an engaging webinar, "Data Centers in Pennsylvania—Why Here? Why Now?" This session provides a clear overview of data centers, exploring why Pennsylvania's abundant energy, accessible water, and skilled workforce make it an ideal location. Participants will also gain insight into the concerns rural residents may have about data center development, encouraging thoughtful dialogue on both the opportunities and challenges. This program is well suited for community members, policymakers, and industry stakeholders alike.Who is this for?
Laura studies the extent to which collusion can explain the under-provision of clean sanitation technologies in developing countries. Using latrine desludging services in Dakar as a case-study, she documents that prices are 40% lower in competitive areas than in areas where prices are coordinated by a trade association. She then develops an experimental just-in-time auction platform with random variation in several design features to formally test for collusive conduct and estimate the welfare costs of imperfect competition.
Department of GeosciencesColloquium SeriesFall 2025Mike McGlueUniversity of KentuckyHost: Sarah Ivory
The Pennsylvania Geological Survey has been collecting and sharing information about the state’s mineral resources since 1836. They started investigating critical minerals in particular with the advent of the USGS Earth MRI program in 2019. Earth MRI is designed to provide reconnaissance level data across the nation to aid in assessing critical mineral resources and potential. USGS invests in large acquisitions of geophysical and elevation data and provides funds to States for geologic and geochemical mapping.
Plant viruses pose a significant threat to global food security and are among the most challenging plant diseases to control. Biotechnology offers promising strategies to combat these emerging threats. RNA interference (RNAi) has been widely used to prevent plant infections and remains a crucial method for sustainable virus control. Additionally, genome editing and the expression of antiviral genes show potential for future adoption.
Come to support the Engineering Design 100 students as they present their final designs for the Climate Resilience and Adaptation Design Symposium! Solutions will focus on designing for climate-related problems in power generation, transmission, and distribution. Enjoy a hot catered breakfast and learn about climate resilience and adaptation with electric power systems! The symposium will take place in the Art Gallery with presentations starting promptly at 9:05 am (you may come early to grab a bite to eat and your seat).
Hydrogen gas is essential to our food and energy infrastructure to address climate change; H2 should be made with limited CO2 emissions. Two methods of green (no fossil fuels) H2 production discussed here are: water electrolyzers (WE) using impaired (salty) water; and microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) fueled by organic matter. One type of WE developed in Logan's lab uses thin-film composite (TFC) membranes (mass-manufactured for seawater desalination) that separate seawater from a contained salt electrolyte.
Excess nutrients remain a leading cause of stream impairment in Pennsylvania, posing ongoing challenges for water quality and farm management. This session, part of the Water Quality Insights Series, draws on decades of field-based research from the U.S. Department of Agriculture–Agricultural Research Service's Pasture Systems and Watershed Management Research Unit to examine nutrient movement through agricultural watersheds.
Coral bleaching is a phenomenon caused by climate change that can destroy coral reef ecosystems and might thereby reduce fish stocks. As a consequence, it can pose a threat to the economic well-being of communities that depend on coastal fisheries, in particular in developing countries.
Explore how Penn State's long-standing leadership in nuclear innovation is driving the future of energy resilience and workforce development in Pennsylvania. This session begins with a look at the university's and the Commonwealth's history of nuclear excellence, setting the stage for a forward-looking discussion on advanced nuclear technologies and their role in supporting energy abundance for data centers, manufacturing, and national security.
Meteorology ColloquiumSpeaker: Benjamin Nault, Johns HopkinsContact: Ken Davis
Since only two cell-cultivated chicken products and one cell-cultivated salmon have recently been approved for sale in the U.S., consumer preferences for such products remain largely unexplored beyond hypothetical studies. Wang investigates consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) through a Clock-Proxy bundle auction experiment that incorporates both the actual products and a visit to the firm, Wildtype, as part of the bundle.
Department of GeosciencesColloquium SeriesFall 2025Sarah SlotznickDartmouth CollegeHost: Max Lloyd
This session will provide an overview of ArcGIS Online, including available applications, content discovery strategies and content organization options. Users will learn about available geospatial data, online applications and sharing options. Collaboration options will be discussed as well.
Energy policy is an ever-evolving landscape, particularly for emerging technologies such as anaerobic digesters. This session explores the current federal policy environment shaping the digester industry and highlights notable and innovative state-level policies driving its development. Participants will gain a clearer understanding of how policy influences growth, investment, and opportunities within this important renewable energy sector.Who is this for?
The Millennium Café runs from 10-11 am in the 3rd-floor Café Commons of the Millennium Science Complex building. Join researchers from across campus for a stellar cup of coffee and two < 10-minute interdisciplinary talks.
The reclamation of critical minerals (CM), including rare earth elements (REEs) from coal-related waste materials has been an area of interest due to their abundance, relative availability (e.g. new mining activities are minimized), and opportunities for the remediation of said wastes during processing. Critical minerals (CM) occur in small quantities in fossil energy waste by-products (as compared to traditional ore bodies); thus, novel, and strategic separation and extraction processes are under exploration for their recovery.
The rapid rise of data-intensive workloads, driven by artificial intelligence, is exposing the fundamental energy and latency limits of conventional computing hardware. The memory wall bottleneck, in particular, demands a shift toward new hardware architectures designed to minimize costly data movement. In this seminar, I will present advances at the intersection of materials science and device engineering that address this challenge.