Stanford Energy Seminar | More Value per Tonne: Rethinking How We Use Rock | Tiziana Vanorio, Stanford University
The Stanford Energy Seminar has been a mainstay of energy engagement at Stanford for nearly 20 years and is one of the flagship programs of the Precourt Institute for Energy. We aim to bring a wide variety of perspectives to the Stanford community – academics, entrepreneurs, utilities, non-profits, and more.
About the talk
Rocks may seem ordinary and ubiquitous, but they are the foundation of the geomaterials that underpin modern society—from cement in our built environment to the critical minerals in our smartphones and energy technologies. As the energy transition accelerates and demand for physical infrastructure grows, demand for materials is increasing rapidly. Simply extracting more resources to meet this demand is costly and environmentally consequential. Decades of innovation have made cars more fuel-efficient and batteries more effective; can we apply the same principle to Earth materials? Just as fuel efficiency asks how far we can go on a gallon of fuel, resource efficiency asks how much value we can obtain from a tonne of rock. Rocks themselves may be inexpensive, but extracting, processing, transporting, and developing or expanding the resource are not. Improving material retention and quarry utilization efficiency can therefore create more value from the resources we already extract.
This seminar explores three ways to make each tonne of rock more productive: retaining more usable material through feedstock redesign, extracting multiple values through water–rock interactions, and selecting better through smart sensing. Specifically, we will examine how feedstock redesign for cement can enable lower-temperature processing and decarbonization while conserving mass, increasing material yield and retention; how water interacting with rock under thermal and chemical gradients can mobilize valuable elements and create additional value streams; and how smart sensing could support more targeted extraction by revealing where valuable properties occur within heterogeneous rock resources. Ultimately, resource efficiency asks us to shift the question from how much we can extract to how much useful value we can obtain from what we extract.
Speaker: Tiziana Vanorio, is a Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She leads the Rock Physics and Geomaterials Laboratory, where her research investigates the physics of Earth materials and how their properties evolve through fluid interactions and mechanical and chemical transformations across scales. Her group integrates laboratory experiments, rock physics, and multiscale characterization to connect mineral and microstructural processes to the behavior of rocks and geomaterials. This understanding is used to engineer the subsurface and develop resource-efficient materials, including applications in geothermal systems, CO₂ mineralization, critical minerals, and new cementitious materials inspired by natural mineral transformation and cementation.
Anyone with an interest in energy is welcome to join! You can enjoy seminars in the following ways:
Attend live. The auditorium may change quarter by quarter, so check each seminar event to confirm the location. Explore the current quarter's schedule.Watch live in a browser livestream if available. Check each seminar event for its unique livestream URL.Watch recordings of past seminars Available on the Past Energy Seminars page and the Energy Seminars playlist of the Stanford Energy YouTube channel(For students) Take the seminar as a 1-unit class (CEE 301/ENERGY 301/MS&E 494)
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