AIPG TEXAS SECTION WEBINAR SERIES – Carbon Capture and Storage: A New Frontier in Geoscience
Dr. Alex Bump will opine on July 16, 2024 – Tuesday that Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is a key technology in climate change mitigation. It can be applied to any point source of CO2, and it can abate emissions that are otherwise intractable, such as the process emissions from cement, steel and petrochemical production. Without CCS, mitigation costs double and the paths to NetZero narrow dramatically, and yet, CCS is increasingly controversial—some see it as prolonging fossil fuel use, some see it as a waste of public money, some see it as dangerous, others see it as routine, and most simply don’t know what to think.This talk will explore the context, geology and future of CCS, with particular emphasis on the geology. Despite its apparent similarity to petroleum geology, the goals, constraints and boundary conditions for CCS combine to create a very different idea of what “good” looks like, with profound implications in the current land rush for storage space.
Dr. Alex Bump is a geologist with the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at the Bureau of Economic Geology.He holds a PhD in structural geology and tectonics from the University of Arizona and spent the better part of two decades in petroleum exploration, with experience on six continents. His current work focuses on adapting petroleum exploration tools for CCS to efficiently identify and de-risk carbon storage prospects.
Another Webinar
This is another webinar by John Berry. P.G., C.P.G. to be held on November 21, 2024. He will discuss his views on the abundance of natural oil slicks suggesting that approximately 600,000 tonnes of oil seeps into the oceans worldwide every year from oil accumulations in the sediments beneath the continental shelves and slopes. Title of webinar: “The Use of Natural Oil Slicks inExploration and Oceanography.”
Since the late 1980s rapid mapping of these seeps using various types of satellite imagery has been possible and has been used to guide oil exploration offshore, particularly in deep water, as they form the best pre-drilling evidence of an active charge in offshore basins. However, these slicks can tell us about much more than the mere presence of oil in the subsurface: they contain information about the gravity of the oil and about the structures from which it is seeping, as well as information about surface and subsurface ocean currents and weather patterns. In addition, during the process of mapping these slicks it is necessary to distinguish them from slicks of biological origin and from those slicks due to bilge pumping and other types of pollution. One occasionally also observes evidence for seepage of natural gas, arson on the high seas, and underwater volcanic eruptions.
John Berry, currently serves as a Councilor-at-Large on the AIPG Texas Section Advisory Board. He was Editor of The Professional Geologist from 2017-2020, and has been an AIPG Certified Professional Geologist since 1977. He has a BA (Geology) from University of Pennsylvania (1963) and a MA in Geology from Columbia University (1966), with a focus on geophysics, oceanography and Arctic studies. He has been a mineral exploration geologist (Cu, Au, U), oil company research geologist and consultant, and has worked on five continents.
Register soon (here)