WHAT IS CHEPS?
The Carbon-Free H2 Production and Storage project, or CHEPS for short, is one of five ambitious Big Idea Challenge projects at the University of Oklahoma. CHEPS received seed funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Partnerships at OU to tackle large, impactful problems that affect our state and the nation. Big Idea Challenges require the convergence of expertise from different disciplines.
2023 RESULTS
As we look back in these past two years, the CHEPS team has generated a little over $9M dollars in federal funding – including a $4 million NSF grant to four CHEPS members, two DOE grants of about $750K each, and
an NSF grant through the Growing Convergence Research program
for $3.6 million over five years.
WHAT WE DO
Our project is about finding green and affordable ways to produce energy. The energy needs worldwide increase on a yearly basis, but current production of energy leads to greenhouse gas emissions. That is why the production of energy without harming the environment is a grant challenge for our future. In the United States, and in Oklahoma in particular, we have a lot of natural gas that can be utilized to produce hydrogen, which does not produce CO2 when it burns. However, we need to develop technologies that can take methane molecules and dissociate the hydrogen from the carbon without carbon dioxide production.
We want to produce hydrogen without producing CO2 and then to develop safe and economically feasible technologies for storage and transportation of hydrogen.
“We live in Oklahoma, where we have natural gas as a raw material for hydrogen production, where we are connected to the rest of the country with an excellent network of pipelines to transport H2, and where we have a great team of collaborators and the support of the University of Oklahoma. There is no better fit than OU for a project of this magnitude.”
Dimitrios Papavassiliou, Ph.D.
CHEPS Principal Investigator
LET'S CONNECT
Chemical, Biological & Materials Engineering
Sarkeys Energy Center
100 East Boyd Street, T-301
Norman, OK 73019
(405) 325-5811