California State University at Bakersfield (CSUB) will initiate a new Center for Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) to conduct important research related to water resources in the southern San Joaquin Valley of California as well as to study potential sites and technologies for carbon sequestration in that region. The Center activities, both research and educational, will lead to enhancements in student-involved, state of the art research and faculty productivity at a major California state university that serves student populations that are historically underrepresented in STEM disciplines. Students will be recruited from the southern San Joaquin Valley as part of their education and developing aspirations to continue into Ph.D. programs in the geosciences, mathematics, and/or engineering. The goals will be realized principally through ample student financial support, the release of faculty from a heavy teaching load, enhanced laboratory facilities/equipment, and a center organizational structure that will foster research productivity and networking of subproject faculty and students.
The specific research activities will be conducted through four synergistic subprojects, that include
a) runoff forecasts for the four Sierran rivers that are responsible for most of the natural water supplies of the southern San Joaquin Valley, a globally important agricultural center,
b) statistical modeling of timing of Sierran snowpack accumulation and melt to better understand its spatial distribution with respect to historical changes in temperature and precipitation,
c) subsurface mapping of available storage space and baseline physical characteristics (i.e., lithology) associated with three declining petroleum reservoirs that are candidates for carbon sequestration and enhanced recovery using carbon dioxide, and
d) laboratory injections of supercritical carbon dioxide into samples of the candidate reservoir rocks to constrain expected chemical reactions and their effect on the success of sequestration efforts.
The Center will be strongly committed to educating and graduating B.S. and M.S.-level scientists effectively recruited from a abundant pool of minority students already enrolled at CSUB, in local junior colleges and high schools. In doing so, the center will leverage existing, successful recruitment programs already set up by the host department and school that are funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Education, and local industry, principally Chevron, USA. Finally, the center will serve as a focus of research in a critical agricultural and petroleum resource area and, as such, will collaborate with a large population of researchers in industry, Ph.D.-granting institutions, and government agencies.
Intellectual Merit. The CSUB CREST will develop model pathways of how basic research at a regional comprehensive university such as CSUB can directly contribute to important societal decisions regarding water resource planning and site selection for carbon sequestration projects. The investigators of all four projects are published in the relevant disciplines and have experience with similar projects either at CSUB or at their Ph.D.-granting institutions and have a strong track record of involving students in research. Creative approaches are being proposed that may very well lead to transformative concepts such as the application of functional data regression models to space-time measurements of continuous processes in several of the other sciences and the use of connections between paleo-lake level and regional sea surface paleo-temperature records to make meaningful estimates of changes in river discharge in response to anticipated climate change. The instruments and lab facilities required for the proposed research are already present in the well-equipped CSUB Department of Geological Sciences, or are available at cooperating research institutions.
Broader Impacts. Approximately 100 students from the San Joaquin Valley will be directly involved in the research subprojects as an integral part of an instructional program, after which most will emerge from CSUB eligible for matriculation into graduate school at the Ph.D. level. The best performing students will be awarded research assistantships, tuition and travel funds. With these resources, a vanguard of CSUB students involved in the research projects associated with this award will perform at a high academic level and will graduate on time because they will be freed from working long hours at jobs unrelated to their career aspirations while going to school, a common problem for the socioeconomically disadvantaged students of the CSUB service region. Also as a result of this support many bright students will be attracted to the program, who otherwise would choose non-STEM majors to avoid the extra time commitment demanded by lab-intensive science and mathematics courses. The enhanced research environment and the resultant increases in productivity and dissemination of results will foster networks and partnerships with employees and owners of agricultural and petroleum companies and government officials. This will lead to additional funding opportunities, and hence, contribute to center sustainability. Scientific results important to society will result, including estimates of amount and timing of snowmelt/runoff into a major agricultural center and the volumetric, baseline rock characterization and predicted geochemical evolution of reservoir rocks from the region that have been proposed for carbon sequestration.
