Researchers look through microscopes at damage to fish by rapid decompression.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s (PNNL’s) Earth Systems Science Division provides leadership and solutions that advance Earth system opportunities for energy systems and national security.

Our multi-disciplinary division is connected by a shared commitment to deliver through innovation and collaboration. We solve complex problems in the dynamic Earth system. Our staff steward a breadth of capabilities, including Earth-energy resilience, energy monitoring and technology, subsurface science, environmental assessment, and decision science.

Earth-energy resilience

We help energy system planners and operators, emergency planners, and decision-makers understand changes and risks related to the natural environment that are faced by the energy sector in the following ways.

  • Resilience to extreme events: Focused on extracting knowledge from geospatial data to simulate and observe complex behaviors at the confluence of the natural and built environment, providing a basis to inform decision making.
  • Long-term energy system planning: Aims to develop multi-scale models and analytics to understand Earth, water, land use, and energy system interactions.
  • Earth-energy science: Engages in research to understand Earth changes and enable effective responses, combining observations from the field and the laboratory with modeling and advanced computation. 

Energy monitoring and technology

We help energy developers and operators understand and mitigate the risks to the natural environment and provide engineered solutions for operational improvements.

  • Sensor and algorithm development: Develops and deploys advanced devices and integrated systems to measure and evaluate environmental interactions with new energy systems 
  • Ecological interactions and impacts: Studies interactions of aquatic life with their habitat, with a special focus on evaluating the effects of hydroelectric dams and their operations on the behavior, survival, and population-level productivity of fish.
  • Engineering and operational performance: Evaluates and improves design and production lifecycle of energy systems to enable long-lasting, efficient operational performance.

Subsurface science

We provide comprehensive solutions for engineering, monitoring, and predicting subsurface processes focused on energy production, national security, and remediation.

  • Subsurface utilization for energy: Enables integrated resource utilization, geologic energy extraction and storage, securing critical materials, and management of energy-related wastes. 
  • Subsurface remediation: Provides an understanding of how contaminants will behave in the environment through core competencies in the nature and extent of contamination, remedial design, remedial systems engineering, and end states.
  • Subsurface security applications: Studies and understands signatures of nuclear explosions through fundamental scientific principles and leveraging geophysics to characterize Earth’s response to an explosion. 

Environmental assessment

We help sponsors by developing analyses for environmental risks associated with new and existing nuclear energy and other energy sources and infrastructure.

  • Environmental and nuclear risk: Develops complex environmental and safety-related analyses for energy project siting, deployment, and operation using sponsor-specific compliance approaches and national compliance standards.
  • Regulatory compliance and permitting: Develops approaches and solutions for streamlining complex regulatory review and permitting processes for new and existing energy and infrastructure projects.

Decision science

We enable decision-making through delivering data visualization, data management, decision analysis, and other software solutions.

  • Risk analytics: Allows complex methodologies to show tradeoffs between consequences, vulnerabilities, and threats. This lets us combine rare high consequence threats and higher probability lower consequence threats and make decisions to best mitigate both threats vs. addressing each individually.
  • Decision analytics: Combines outputs from many different models, elicitations, and algorithms to enables actionable decisions.
  • Decision systems: Develops robust, reusable software tools encapsulating decision science capabilities and provides them to users and stakeholders. High quality, testable software increases confidence in data and analytically driven decision making.