NTNU and MIT announce research collaboration

“This agreement will allow us to collaborate with leading experts in the energy field at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), while educating four Ph.D. and one postdoctoral candidate at NTNU,” says Thomas Alan Adams, professor at the Department of Energy and Process Engineering, NTNU.

From MIT, senior scientist Audun Botterud says: “This collaboration expands our interactions with Norway in energy-climate research, which is a high priority area at MIT (see, e.g.: https://climateproject.mit.edu/). This new NTNUI-MIT initiative will add to other successful research engagements with collaborators around the world”.

Solving challenging problems

The program spans four years, during which 9 Ph.D./postdoc candidates will be educated across five projects. The candidates will be jointly supervised by NTNU and MIT. The five projects have been selected to address key issues that can accelerate energy transition and sustainable solutions and systems.

“The purpose of such joint research collaboration is to tackle challenging issues together. And we naturally want to collaborate with leading international researchers,” says Asgeir Tomasgard, director of NTNU Energy and professor at the Department of Industrial Economics and Technology Management.

Extensive collaboration

On the other side of the Atlantic, Professors Christoph Reinhart and Audun Botterud, Senior Researcher at MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, have high hopes about the collaboration.
“We hope to expand on existing connections and build new relationships with leading energy researchers at NTNU. The joint program will also contribute towards educating graduate students at both institutions”.

 In addition to supervising their own candidates, they will act as co-supervisors for Ph.D. and postdoctoral candidates at NTNU.  There will also be extensive collaboration between the universities when the research projects starts and the candidates are in place.

“We hope that this model foster new innovative ideas and solutions that will enable a more rapid transition towards cleaner energy systems”, says Botterud.

Eager to start

Professor Thomas A. Adams has candidates Matthias Maeir and Sudip Sharma associated with two of the projects. Together with professor Sungho Shin from MIT Chemical Engineering, they will work on “Supply Chains for Green Hydrogen Economy,” which looks at various ways to deliver hydrogen with a low carbon footprint to mainland Europe, either from Norway or North America.

“In this project, the NTNU team will look at the technical details of how such processes work, their efficiency, costs, and environmental impacts, while the MIT team specializes in optimization techniques,” explains Adams. “We will likely collaborate in this way on most projects, and for the candidates, there will be great opportunities for shorter or longer stays at the other university.”

Recruitment is underway, and joint publications and research stays at the universities will be part of the program.

Audun Botterud says they are looking forward to start: “we will do our best to foster collaborations between students/postdocs at the two universities.”

The five research projects identified as focus areas for the four-year program (2024-2028) are:

• Markets for zero-carbon energy systems: This project addresses fundamental questions in market design for emission-free energy systems. NTNU and MIT have collaborated on this topic
  since 2018, resulting in several joint publications on the subject.
• Green hydrogen economy supply chains: This project addresses the critical need for sustainable and secure energy supply in Europe, focusing on what will replace Russian natural gas and
  oil products that Europe used to buy from Russia.
• Electrification of chemical processes:
  The aim here is to replace fossil energy used in the chemical process industry with electricity from low-carbon sources, driven by the explosive growth in renewable energy and the resurgence of interest in nuclear power.
• Energy and climate positive buildings, neighborhoods, and cities: Cities account for about 75% of
  global CO2 emissions, with transport and buildings being the largest contributors. This project focuses on building zero-emission homes, optimizing energy use, utilizing local renewable energy, and changing transportation patterns.
• Multiscale stochastic optimization for integrated energy systems: This project focuses on
  methodological development for multiscale modeling and algorithms for integrated energy systems.