Integrated Aquifer Characterization and Modeling for Energy Sustainability: Key Lessons from the Petroleum Industry

The greatest challenge facing humanity today is the transition to a more sustainable energy infrastructure while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Meeting this challenge will require a diversified array of solutions spanning across multiple industries. One of the solutions rising to the fore is the potential to rapidly build out carbon sequestration, which involves the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere and its storage in the subsurface. Integrated Aquifer Characterization and Modeling for Energy Sustainability: Key Lessons from the Petroleum Industry provides a comprehensive and practical technical guide into the potential that aquifers hold as sites for carbon and energy storage.

Aquifers occupy a significant part of the Earth’s available volume in the subsurface and thus hold immense potential as sites for carbon storage. Many aquifers have been studied extensively as part of oil and gas energy development projects and, as such, they represent an opportunity to sequester carbon within existing areas of infrastructure that have already been impacted by, and integrated into, an inherited energy framework. Moreover, future efforts to reconfigure the landscape of our national and global energy systems can extract valuable lessons from this existing trove of data and expertise.

From a multidisciplinary perspective, this book provides a valuable and up-to-date overview of how we can draw on the wealth of existing technologies and data deployed by the petroleum industry in the transition to a more sustainable future. Integrated Aquifer Characterization and Modeling for Energy Sustainability will be of value to academic, professional and business audiences who wish to evaluate the potential underground storage of carbon and/or energy, and for policy makers in developing the right policy tools to further the goals of a sustainable energy transition.

Dr M.R. Fassihi is a BHP Distinguished Advisor Emeritus with primary responsibilities including technical assurance, competency development within the company, identification and development of emerging and white-space technology opportunities, and provision of technological advice and counsel to senior management. He was the Technical Liaison in Joint Industry Projects on CO2 sequestration, alternative energy including geothermal and innovative technologies for mineral extraction. Dr Fassihi has over 40 years of experience in petroleum research, development, and management of both conventional and unconventional reservoirs. His previous companies of affiliations were Arco, Amoco, and BP. As a founder of Beyond Carbon, LLC, he is currently providing consulting services on reservoir management, project assurance, CCS with a focus on how to reduce the carbon footprint in the energy industry.

Dr Fassihi has published more than 45 peer reviewed publications and is the author of the SPE Monograph on "Low-Energy Processes for Unconventional-Oil Recovery". He has won numerous awards including: the SPE Student Paper Contest, PhD Division (1980), Best Paper Award at the 1988 CIM Meeting, SPE Distinguished Lecturer (2003), The international IOR Pioneer Award, Tulsa (2018), and the SPE Distinguished Member Award (2018).

is currently (2017-Present) a Practice Lead for Geophysics at BHP Petroleum, where he provides technical guidance in subsurface matters. He was Chief Geophysicist for Hess from 2010-2016, where he was responsible for the Geophysics Department within Science & Technology as well as providing technical assurance for major projects across the enterprise. Blangy has more than 30 years of experience in the oil-and-gas industry. Prior to BHP and Hess, he spent 19 years with Amoco/BP, where he served in various management and technical roles across the Exploration, Appraisal and Production value chains as well as Mergers & Acquisitions. Blangy began his career with Unocal (1986-1989). Blangy has authored or co-authored more than 50 papers in a broad spectrum of topics in Geophysics and Rock Mechanics. He holds a BSc in Geophysics from the Colorado School of Mines, MSc degrees in Exploration from Stanford University and in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Houston, as well as a PhD in Rock Physics from Stanford.