By Nicole Schaeffer

As the world moves to a more sustainable future, reliable and environmentally friendly sources of energy only become more important. Thus, the Department of Energy drew the starting line for seven races, known formally as the Earthshot Initiatives, to harness more accessible and sustainable sources of clean energy. It is under the Geothermal Earthshot Initiative that UCI Professors Russ Detwiler and Mohammad J. A. Qomi are heating things up and getting things flowing.

What is geothermal energy, and why do we care?

The potential of geothermal energy is evident in places like the Salton Sea, where at depths of thousands of feet, water flowing through hot porous igneous rocks reaches temperatures in excess of 500℉. That water is pumped to the surface where the thermal energy is converted to electricity in a geothermal power plant. However, there are relatively few places in the world with this combination of hot rocks with sufficient permeability relatively close to the surface to allow cost-effective extraction of geothermal energy. This is where Professor Qomi felt he could convert his talent for simulation and background in studying the behavior of porous media into real life use.  

“Professor Detwiler first shared a paper with me on carbon sequestration from the journal Science,” Professor Qomi stated, “and later he and Professor Sorooshian encouraged me to reach out to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) scientists and share my ideas with them. This began a fruitful collaboration between UCI and PNNL, and at this point we co-advise PhD students and write technical papers together.” 

Thus, Professor Qomi set to work on creating models to simulate how water could flow through porous media from a source to technology that would more efficiently convert geothermal energy into usable electricity. 

“However, part of the hypothetical process is that you can never be one hundred percent accurate to real life,” Professor Qomi confessed.

Professor Detwiler agreed, “Models are useful to test hypotheses, but experiments are necessary to test whether those models are accurately representing the problem at hand.”

Professor Detwiler, who spent seven years running laboratory experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Lab prior to joining the CEE department at UCI, led experimental and modeling research on using electric resistivity to study liquid flow through cracks and subsurface systems.

Professor Detwiler states, “I’m an experimentalist by nature, but I value computational modeling for the insights it can bring when interpreting complex experiments.” 

 It is a well-established principle that water flow causes erosion of the landscape it traverses across. In most undergraduate fluid mechanics classes, this type of subtle change in surface structure would be considered negligible to make calculations easier. However, Professor Qomi wanted to simulate flow through media with pores on a scale so microscopic, they could not be observed accurately with the human eye. He was having to simulate two continuously changing variables that are interdependent:  as water flows through porous media it will erode the walls, react with the debris, and deposit sediment along its path, thus changing the tunnel structure itself which then affects the rate of flow. Professor Detwiler’s experience in using electric resistivity to understand flow and running experiments of similar nature was necessary to make Professor Qomi’s model useful for designing real-life systems. 

With their combined effort, and the help of others such as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Argonne National Lab, Purdue University, Colorado School of Mines, University of Maryland, these UCI professors are working to create a smooth flow over rocky obstacles that stand between the world and reliable geothermal energy.

Why U.C. Yourself at UCI?

When asked about the favorite part of their careers, the two professors had a lot to say:

“His favorite part was meeting me,” Professor Qomi proudly jested while Professor Detwiler chuckled to himself, “and my favorite part is the luxury of having a diverse and talented team. You have people from the east, north, south and our team in the west, all collaborating trying to solve this big environmental problem: our current team for example has Ph.D. students from Mexico, a Post-Doc from Ghana, and another Post-Doc from China. People from diverse backgrounds are coming together and providing their perspectives on this problem, and that is really cool!”

“My actual favorite part,” Professor Detwiler replied, “is studying problems where you don’t know what the answer is at the outset, which taps into my sense of adventure. This job allows us to take time to regularly explore new ideas. I suppose that’s also why I like adventurous activities in the mountains and desert. My wife and I originally were not too sure about moving here from the bay area, but there are great opportunities to explore outdoors not far from campus.”

Professor Qomi agreed wholeheartedly about the weather, citing his first time to UCI upon nearing completion of his Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “There would be up to twelve feet of piled up snow during February and March in Boston, and back then as an international student I thought that was all that the United States was. Then I came to California for a job interview, and the weather was so warm, as were the people like Professor Ritchie who welcomed me and encouraged me to join the rank of faculty at UC Irvine.”

“People can really make or break a place,” Professor Detwiler stated. At his previous research laboratory, he worked on collaborative projects with other established scientists. UCI gave him an opportunity to work with students and fresh minds with much room to grow. 

“Academic jobs offer daily interaction with young and brilliant students. This keeps that inner curious child alive that is necessary for creative scientific contributions and discoveries.” Professor Qomi, proud and loving father of two, says. “You have to realize that getting an academic job is not an easy feat, as the percentage of people who keep moving forward to a Master’s degree to a Ph.D. to a post doctoral position to a full-time tenured faculty gets exponentially smaller. Becoming a faculty is a great honor and with that you are trusted to play a central role in the students’ intellectual growth.” 

As leaders of their respective laboratories, Professor Russ Detwiler with the Subsurface Processes Visualization Lab and Professor Mohammad J. A. Qomi with the Advanced Infrastructure Materials and Systems (AIMS) Lab are not only ensuring the sustainability of geothermal energy but are also continuing academic passion to the next generations.

For their current and future contributions, UCI Professors Detwiler and Qomi were awarded $1.8M to use over the course of four years by the Department of Energy.

Photo caption: Professors Detwiler (left) and Qomi (right) in Professor Detwiler’s laboratory at UC Irvine