Bridging Energy, Resources, and Global Change: Balanced Solutions for a Growing Society

Society is navigating a high-stakes transition in how we produce, move, and manage energy and natural resources under accelerating climate stress. The Jackson School has deep expertise in subsurface systems, water resources, and climate science, with growing strength in critical minerals. Yet these strengths often operate as parallel efforts rather than in an integrated way, creating a challenge in building interdisciplinary approaches.

Major scientific gaps persist in understanding how subsurface processes connect to large-scale system resilience and how geoscience can anticipate future energy and resource needs. Stakeholders include federal agencies, state regulators, infrastructure managers, utilities, private-sector partners, and communities.

Goals

The Energy and Global Change SIP will address these challenges by launching two foundational initiatives that define the school’s first phase of action: Frontiers in Critical Materials. This effort integrates resource characterization, technology development, environmental protection, global change, and policies.

Two initiatives will be developed for this SIP:

1. Terrestrial Critical Materials: For many critical materials, the U.S. relies predominantly on imports, with limited domestic mining and processing capacity. With the projected growth in grid expansion, technology, and low-carbon resources, demand is expected to outpace supply. In this initiative, the team will conduct research to understand these resources, as well as environmental, societal, and global change aspects.
2. Marine Critical Materials: The continental margins and ocean floor may hold the key to the next century of critical mineral innovation. Yet these frontiers remain poorly mapped, technologically challenging, and environmentally uncertain. In this initiative, research may focus on the development of tools and frameworks for identifying critical minerals in inaccessible regions, studying the policy and geopolitical implications, and potential environmental impacts of marine critical resource exploration and development.

Leads

Opportunities

Current faculty and researchers interested in participating in the Energy and Global Change SIP should reach out to the leads for more information.