Six institution-wide Major Initiatives exemplify PNNL’s efforts to integrate scientific discovery and technological innovation to address some of the nation’s most complex and pressing challenges. Each Major Initiative embodies a five- to ten-year commitment of resources to achieve significant, breakthrough progress in its focus area.

Recycling Carbon for Difficult-to-Decarbonize Fuels and Products accelerates the attainment of global clean energy goals through advances in technologies that can facilitate a transition away from fossil fuels in systems that are particularly difficult to electrify, including fuels for aviation, for heavy-duty vehicular and marine transportation, and for chemical and polymer production.

Predicting the Evolution of the Multiscale Earth System strives to increase the predictive power of integrated Earth system models to inform more effective, sustainable, and equitable responses to environmental changes.

Understanding, Predicting, and Controlling the Microbial Phenome enhances understanding of the living Earth system and harnesses the microbial phenome to advance U.S. leadership in the rapidly-growing global bioeconomy.

Machine Reasoning for Scientific Discovery advances current machine learning approaches to create reasoning systems capable of providing reliable predictions—with low latency—from limited data and incomplete domain knowledge.

Decarbonizing the Power Grid designs and demonstrates interconnection-wide grid controls and affordable energy storage solutions spurring a transition to carbon neutral generation and electrification, and ensuring high levels of grid reliability and energy system resilience.

Accelerating Development and Characterization of Nuclear Material Processing drives the modernization of material processing for the nuclear stockpile and next- generation nuclear energy technologies through the development of new methodologies, analytical tools, and technologies enabling predictive understanding of material properties and behaviors.