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Pictured from left: Vincent Giordano III, project executive at Giordano Construction; Bryan D’Orlando, associate director of construction project management in the Yale Office of Facilities; Shellie Anello, construction project manager in the Yale Office of Facilities
On Science Hill, there is a real-world lesson in renewable energy taking place—one that’s happening outside the labs and classrooms.
A fleet of bulldozers, excavators, and dump trucks have been working for months to prep the ground for the start of what will be the largest facilities project in Yale’s modern history: the Upper Science Hill Development. When completed in 2030, an expansive series of new and renovated buildings will serve as a hub for Yale’s work in quantum and materials science, physics, applied physics, advanced instrumentation development, and other emerging scientific fields.
With its trucks and hard-hats, the Science Hill job site resembles any other, with one key difference: there are no plumes of black exhaust pumping out of the machines. That’s because the construction equipment is running on R-99 fuel, a cleaner burning alternative to diesel that is made from waste cooking oils.
Sometimes referred to as “renewable diesel” or “green diesel,” R-99 can be used directly in place of petroleum-based diesel or blended with it. Yale’s construction contractors are using R-99 on Science Hill as part of the university’s multifaceted climate action strategy to reduce campus emissions to zero no later than 2050.
Though not yet in wide use, R-99 has shown potential as a greener alternative to standard diesel fuel. In a U.S. Department of Energy study, UPS delivery trucks tested with R-99 showed a consistent 4.2% reduction in tailpipe CO2 emissions and a 4.1% reduction in nitrous oxides compared with conventional diesel. Likewise, a study by the California Air Resources Board showed that R-99 reduced carbon intensity—defined as the amount carbon dioxide released to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity—by an average of 65% when compared with petroleum diesel.
“We are always striving to think innovatively when it comes to instituting sustainability into our construction practices, and in this case, the use of R-99 fuel helped this cause,” says Shellie Anello, a Yale Office of Facilities construction project manager overseeing the Upper Science Hill Development.
Overcoming Obstacles
The search for a greener fuel source began before ground was broken on the Upper Science Hill Development. At Yale’s request, the contractor overseeing the site preparation work, Giordano Construction, initially sought out zero-emission battery-powered construction equipment. But the company soon learned the technology isn’t yet a match for a job of this scale.
“We found battery-powered excavators that are 1.5 tons, the really little ones, but the battery life was only about four hours,” explains Vincent Giordano III, project executive at Giordano Construction. “We run 25- to 40-ton machines for eight-plus hours a day, so that didn’t suit our needs.”
Recharging the batteries would have posed another challenge: the most common method is to use diesel generators, which negates much of the benefit of using battery power in the first place.
That led Giordano and the Yale Facilities team to R-99. Though the fuel is not widely distributed on the East Coast, they managed to find a local supplier, East River Energy in Guilford, Connecticut. The feed stock for the fuel comes from waste cooking oils that are collected from restaurants and refined at a facility in Albany, New York.
Before they could deploy R-99 on the job site, however, they had to overcome some ingrained skepticism. For instance, in order to satisfy all warranty requirements for the construction equipment, the fuel had to undergo a series of tests at a Caterpillar fluid analysis lab in Newington, Connecticut.
“The construction industry is very cautious,” explains Giordano. “These machines are expensive, and people are somewhat reticent to put a new fuel into them.”
Shellie Anello, Vincent Giordano III, Bryan D’Orlando, and Rolff Knobel of Turner Construction
‘As long as there are restaurants, we’ll have a steady supply’
The Yale project team is pleased with the performance of the R-99 fuel so far and see a host of benefits. First, it is a “drop-in replacement” for petroleum diesel, meaning it can go directly into engines without any costly retrofits. And unlike some biofuels that gel in cold weather, R-99 performs well to negative 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Lastly, it is a form of locally sourced, renewable energy that makes use of a waste product.
“As long as there are restaurants, we’ll have a steady supply,” Giordano says.
One of the biggest tangible benefits is improved indoor air quality, especially in the Class of 1954 Chemistry Research Building at 275 Prospect St., which sits adjacent to the current construction site.
“Typically, major construction equipment runs off of diesel fuel, which produces undesired diesel fumes,” says Bryan D’Orlando, associate director of construction project management in the Yale Office of Facilities. “With the use of R-99 fuel, we have eliminated the risk of diesel fume exhaust getting into the adjacent air intake.”
The current work on Science Hill is to make way for a new Chemical Safety Building, a facility to store chemicals used in scientific work, and using R-99 on this phase alone will save an estimated 60,000 gallons of petroleum diesel from being burned.
Taken together, the benefits have made R-99 well worth the slightly greater expense, currently around $0.30 per gallon more than standard off-road diesel. “That is a slight added cost for a potentially much greater benefit in the continued fight against climate change,” says D’Orlando.
If R-99 has a downside, D’Orlando says, it’s that the supply chain is presently limited. “The demand, at least in the New Haven area and Connecticut more broadly, is not great,” he says. “Establishing a more robust supplier network here would help lower costs and provide more flexibility with its delivery cadences.”
R-99 is also powering some of the construction equipment at Yale Golf Course as part of a restoration project there. Giordano Construction anticipates needing 30,000 gallons of fuel to power their machines over the life of that job, representing a significant savings in CO2 emissions compared to using conventional diesel fuel.
The Upper Science Hill Development team, meanwhile, plans to continue using R-99 in future Science Hill projects that are slated to commence shortly—and to share information about the fuel with colleagues for potential use on other Yale construction projects.
See the full article here .
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Yale University is a private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Collegiate School was renamed Yale College in 1718 to honor the school’s largest private benefactor for the first century of its existence, Elihu Yale. Yale University is consistently ranked as one of the top universities and is considered one of the most prestigious in the nation.
Chartered by Connecticut Colony, the Collegiate School was established in 1701 by clergy to educate Congregational ministers before moving to New Haven in 1716. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century, the college expanded into graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first PhD in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale’s faculty and student populations grew after 1890 with rapid expansion of the physical campus and scientific research.
Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools: the original undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and twelve professional schools. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each school’s faculty oversees its curriculum and degree programs. In addition to a central campus in downtown New Haven, the university owns athletic facilities in western New Haven, a campus in West Haven, Connecticut, and forests and nature preserves throughout New England. As of June 2020, the university’s endowment was valued at $31.1 billion, the second largest of any educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States. Students compete in intercollegiate sports as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League.
Nobel laureates, Fields Medalists, Abel Prize laureates, and Turing award winners have been affiliated with Yale University. In addition, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including U.S. Presidents, U.S. Supreme Court Justices, living billionaires, and heads of state. Hundreds of members of Congress and many U.S. diplomats, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and Mitchell Scholars have been affiliated with the university.
Research
Yale is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU) and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”. According to the National Science Foundation , Yale spends $990 million on research and development.
Yale’s faculty include members of the National Academy of Sciences , members of the National Academy of Engineering and members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . The college is, after normalization for institution size, the tenth-largest baccalaureate source of doctoral degree recipients in the United States, and the largest such source within the Ivy League.
Yale’s English and Comparative Literature departments were part of the New Criticism movement. Of the New Critics, Robert Penn Warren, W.K. Wimsatt, and Cleanth Brooks were all Yale faculty. Later, the Yale Comparative literature department became a center of American deconstruction. Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, taught at the Department of Comparative Literature from the late seventies to mid-1980s. Several other Yale faculty members were also associated with deconstruction, forming the so-called “Yale School”. These included Paul de Man who taught in the Departments of Comparative Literature and French, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman (both taught in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature), and Harold Bloom (English), whose theoretical position was always somewhat specific, and who ultimately took a very different path from the rest of this group. Yale’s history department has also originated important intellectual trends. Historians C. Vann Woodward and David Brion Davis are credited with beginning in the 1960s and 1970s an important stream of southern historians; likewise, David Montgomery, a labor historian, advised many of the current generation of labor historians in the country. Yale’s Music School and Department fostered the growth of Music Theory in the latter half of the 20th century. The Journal of Music Theory was founded there in 1957; Allen Forte and David Lewin were influential teachers and scholars.
In addition to eminent faculty members, Yale research relies heavily on the presence of roughly 1200 Postdocs from various national and international origin working in the multiple laboratories in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and professional schools of the university. The university progressively recognized this working force with the recent creation of the Office for Postdoctoral Affairs and the Yale Postdoctoral Association.
Notable alumni
Over its history, Yale has produced many distinguished alumni in a variety of fields, ranging from the public to private sector. around 71% of undergraduates join the workforce, while the next largest majority of 16.6% go on to attend graduate or professional schools. Yale graduates have been recipients of Rhodes Scholarships, Marshall Scholarships, Truman Scholarships, Churchill Scholarships, and Mitchell Scholarships. The university is also the second largest producer of Fulbright Scholars, and has produced many MacArthur Fellows. The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs ranked Yale very high among research institutions producing the most Fulbright Scholars. Additionally, many living billionaires are Yale alumni.
At Yale, one of the most popular undergraduate majors among Juniors and Seniors is political science, with many students going on to serve careers in government and politics. Former presidents who attended Yale for undergrad include William Howard Taft, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush while former presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton attended Yale Law School. Former vice-president and influential antebellum era politician John C. Calhoun also graduated from Yale. Former world leaders include Italian prime minister Mario Monti, Turkish prime minister Tansu Çiller, Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, German president Karl Carstens, Philippine president José Paciano Laurel, Latvian president Valdis Zatlers, Taiwanese premier Jiang Yi-huah, and Malawian president Peter Mutharika, among others. Prominent royals who graduated are Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, and Olympia Bonaparte, Princess Napoléon.
Yale alumni have had considerable presence in U.S. government in all three branches. On the U.S. Supreme Court, justices have been Yale alumni, including current Associate Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh. Numerous Yale alumni have been U.S. Senators, including current Senators Michael Bennet, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Chris Coons, Amy Klobuchar, Ben Sasse, and Sheldon Whitehouse. Current and former cabinet members include Secretaries of State John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson; U.S. Secretaries of the Treasury Oliver Wolcott, Robert Rubin, Nicholas F. Brady, Steven Mnuchin, and Janet Yellen; U.S. Attorneys General Nicholas Katzenbach, John Ashcroft, and Edward H. Levi; and many others. Peace Corps founder and American diplomat Sargent Shriver and public official and urban planner Robert Moses are Yale alumni.
Yale has produced numerous award-winning authors and influential writers, like Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Sinclair Lewis and Pulitzer Prize winners Stephen Vincent Benét, Thornton Wilder, Doug Wright, and David McCullough. Academy Award winning actors, actresses, and directors include Jodie Foster, Paul Newman, Meryl Streep, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Lupita Nyong’o, Oliver Stone, and Frances McDormand. Alumni from Yale have also made notable contributions to both music and the arts. Leading American composer from the 20th century Charles Ives, Broadway composer Cole Porter, Grammy award winner David Lang, and award-winning jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer all hail from Yale. Hugo Boss Prize winner Matthew Barney, famed American sculptor Richard Serra, President Barack Obama presidential portrait painter Kehinde Wiley, MacArthur Fellow and contemporary artist Sarah Sze, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and National Medal of Arts photorealist painter Chuck Close all graduated from Yale. Additional alumni include architect and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner Maya Lin, Pritzker Prize winner Norman Foster, and Gateway Arch designer Eero Saarinen. Journalists and pundits include Dick Cavett, Chris Cuomo, Anderson Cooper, William F. Buckley, Jr., and Fareed Zakaria.
In business, Yale has had numerous alumni and former students go on to become founders of influential business, like William Boeing (Boeing, United Airlines), Briton Hadden and Henry Luce (Time Magazine), Stephen A. Schwarzman (Blackstone Group), Frederick W. Smith (FedEx), Juan Trippe (Pan Am), Harold Stanley (Morgan Stanley), Bing Gordon (Electronic Arts), and Ben Silbermann (Pinterest). Other business people from Yale include former chairman and CEO of Sears Holdings Edward Lampert, former Time Warner president Jeffrey Bewkes, former PepsiCo chairperson and CEO Indra Nooyi, sports agent Donald Dell, and investor/philanthropist Sir John Templeton.
Yale alumni distinguished in academia include literary critic and historian Henry Louis Gates, economists Irving Fischer, Mahbub ul Haq, and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman; Nobel Prize in Physics laureates Ernest Lawrence and Murray Gell-Mann; Fields Medalist John G. Thompson; Human Genome Project leader and National Institutes of Health director Francis S. Collins; brain surgery pioneer Harvey Cushing; pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper; influential mathematician and chemist Josiah Willard Gibbs; National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee and biochemist Florence B. Seibert; Turing Award recipient Ron Rivest; inventors Samuel F.B. Morse and Eli Whitney; Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate John B. Goodenough; lexicographer Noah Webster; and theologians Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr.
In the sporting arena, Yale alumni include baseball players Ron Darling and Craig Breslow and baseball executives Theo Epstein and George Weiss; football players Calvin Hill, Gary Fenick, Amos Alonzo Stagg, and “the Father of American Football” Walter Camp; ice hockey players Chris Higgins and Olympian Helen Resor; Olympic figure skaters Sarah Hughes and Nathan Chen; nine-time U.S. Squash men’s champion Julian Illingworth; Olympic swimmer Don Schollander; Olympic rowers Josh West and Rusty Wailes; Olympic sailor Stuart McNay; Olympic runner Frank Shorter; and others.
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