Texas Monthly lauded a UT research scientist for her efforts in reducing carbon dioxide emissions produced by power plants.
The magazine named Susan Hovorka, a scientist for the Bureau of Economic Geology, one of the top "35 people who will shape our future" in its February issue.
The final 35 seemed poised to make a transformation or leap forward, said Jake Silverstein, a senior editor at Texas Monthly. Tremendously well-known figures were not included, he said.
"It's a UT team effort," Hovorka said, "It's not me by myself, but I'm flattered to represent the community."
The bureau and the chemical and petroleum engineering departments at UT are working together to research and test carbon sequestration, the process by which carbon is captured after leaving power plants. They are also determining safe sites to store the carbon dioxide and ensuring that properties of the rocks used for storing will keep the gas underground, Hovorka said.
About 50 people at UT are working on the carbon sequestration research along with 100 more collaborators from across the globe, Hovorka said.
"UT may have the greatest concentration of people working on these things out of the universities in the United States," she said.
The bureau received a $38 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy in October for a research site in Mississippi that has a large number of power plants.
"People know there's an option, through our research, to use fossil fuels and not emit [carbon dioxide] into the atmosphere," Hovorka said.
Large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions change the heat balance in the air and water, leading to global warming.
"Texas has already been such a leader for so many years in energy production," Silverstein said. "There is a poetry to [Hovorka's] work that sought to make Texas also a leader in providing green solutions for the byproducts of our energy industry, letting Texas come full circle."
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