"Geothermal energy from coal mines can be used not only to heat homes and buildings, but also to cool them. That opens up many more opportunities, especially for data centers. They are some of the worst carbon offenders, using vast amounts of energy and requiring thousands of gallons of water to cool themselves. Now, researchers in Scotland are studying how hot air from data centers can be pumped into coal mines and then recovered from the water to heat other buildings."

 "For a long time, people have been gathering that heat and using it to warm nearby buildings or turn turbines that generate electricity. Iceland gets about two-thirds of its energy—and nearly 100 percent of its heat—from geothermal sources. The city of Boise, Idaho, uses geothermal to warm some downtown buildings, and it has for more than a century."

"Startup Lithos Carbon, however, is focusing on the land, and a natural tool: basalt, a black igneous rock that’s common on volcanically active islands like Hawaii and Iceland. Lithos recycles existing basalt dust—a quarrying by-product—and spreads it over crop land. When rainwater mixes with the basalt dust, it triggers a chemical reaction that captures and locks up CO2 as bicarbonate."

"The modules will use carbonate fuel cells to efficiently capture and concentrate carbon dioxide streams. Combustion exhaust from an external source, like a flue stream, will be directed to the fuel cell, which electrochemically reacts fuel and air to produce power, while capturing and concentrating carbon dioxide for utilization or permanent storage. The modular design enables the technology to be deployed at a wide range of locations, operate at high efficiency, and advance business goals at hard-to-decarbonize industrial and commercial applications."

"The MARVEL reactor will be constructed at INL’s Transient Reactor Test Facility. Yasir Arafat, project lead for MARVEL, showed me the site and provided an overview of the project. Arafat explained that microreactors are 'very tiny reactors' compared to today’s more standard gigawatt-scale commercial units. He said they typically produce single-digit megawatt output, although some can run up to 20 MW or more. Arafat noted that microreactors have three key features: they can be built in factories, transported over standard roads, and are self-regulating, that is, they’re automated to operate safely without human interaction."