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The US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a reusable organic liquid that can pull harmful gases such as carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide out of industrial emissions from power plants. The process could directly replace current methods and allow power plants to capture double the amount of harmful gases in a way that uses no water, less energy and saves money.

To use hydrogen as a clean energy source, some engineers want to pack it into a larger molecule, rather than compressing the gas into a tank. But getting hydrogen out of a molecule requires a catalyst. Now, researchers reveal new details about one such rhodium-based catalyst Aug. 5 issue in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The results are a step toward designing catalysts for use in hydrogen energy applications such as fuel cells.

The newest supercomputer in town is almost 15 times faster than its predecessor and ready to take on problems in areas such as climate science, hydrogen storage and molecular chemistry. The $21.4 million Chinook supercomputer was built by HP, tested by a variety of researchers, and has now been commissioned for use by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the US Department of Energy.

Acoustic tags and numerical river models are two technologies developed by researchers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory that are helping improve salmon passage at the Columbia Basin's hydroelectric dams. PNNL researchers will discuss these technologies and how they make scientific contributions to the endangered fish's survival during group technical presentations at Waterpower XVI, a conference for professionals in the hydroelectric industry that runs July 27-30, 2009, in Spokane, Wash.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have won two of R&D Magazine's prestigious "R&D 100 Awards" for advanced instrumentation for human health and for innovative engineering for renewable energy sources. PNNL's award-winning technologies include the PowerPuck: creating electrical energy from the environment, and the Ultrasensitive ESI-MS Source & Interface: achieving unprecedented analysis levels for human health studies.

A computational mathematician at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has been recognized with a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The PECASE award honors his research on subsurface flow that addresses past and future energy needs: cleaning up buried nuclear or toxic contaminants and storing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels underground. Mathematically modeling activity in the subsurface allows researchers to trap contaminants or carbon dioxide, or transform them into minerals.