In the statewide freeze (https://www.air-worldwide.com/blog/posts/2021/6/how-widespread-and-how-extreme-was-the-texas-freeze-and-why/) in the second week of February 2021, there were catastrophic power failures across Texas due to interruptions in the natural gas supply chain. "Nearly 4 million Texas customers-representing more than 11 million people-lost power during the Arctic blast" (see: Dallas Fed Economics https://www.dallasfed.org/research/economics/2021/0415.aspx). Clearly maintaining the natural gas infrastructure is within the mission of the Center for Resiliency by maintaining the power grid and thereby keeping Texans from freezing to death. We seek to build upon the research project titled Detection of Methane Leaks in Soils, which was awarded $49,993 from the Center for Midstream Management and Science (Sept 1, 2021 - Aug. 31, 2022) in adapting novel and innovative methane-detection technologies for solving challenges faced by the petroleum industry in the midstream arena.
Coastal marshes are a critical defense against the destructive forces and flooding of tropical storms, and their high primary productivity and habitats support wildlife and fisheries of economic and cultural value. However, those of the SETX Chenier Plain experience subsidence, leading to dieback of marsh vegetation and conversion to open water, which diminishes their effectiveness in protecting coastal communities. Beneficial use of dredge material (BUDM) restoration results in elevating land and reestablishing vegetation productivity and coastal protection. BUDM restoration is expensive and a Blue Carbon Economy with greenhouse gas emission cap and trade policies can create incentives for greater industry participation in offsetting restoration costs to coastal communities while increasing their resiliency. Blue Carbon Potential (BCP) is the net long-term storage of atmospheric CO2 in coastal sediments which is calculated as net primary production (NPP) of vegetation minus sediment emissions of CO2 and CH4 from microbial respiration and methanogenesis, respectively. Methane emission from coastal marshes maybe greater at subsiding sites with vegetation dieback in SETX Chenier Plain marshes based on the greater relative abundance of methanogens than at healthy and BUDM restored sites. Methane levels in sediments are being measured in SETX to test if BUDM restoration not only increases BCP by increasing vegetation NPP but also by reducing marsh emissions of CH4, a result that could increase the incentive for industry to participate in BUDM restoration for coastal resiliency.
Pathogen detection in water samples, without complex and time consuming procedures such as fluorescent-labeling or culture-based incubation, is essential to public safety. We propose a design to be integrated with the common mobile electronics to achieve two key features: (a) High performance detection: a microfabricated lens is used to form a narrow beam scanning to produce a dark-field optical scattering image of an object of interest that overlays with the bright-field image produced by the same CMOS image sensor (b) Simplified sample preparation: use of capillary-driven microfluidics integrated with latex immuoagglutination approach, which offers high specificity and sensitivity, for cost-effective and rapid detection of pathogen levels from water or liquid samples.