People

Peter Cook
Prof. Peter Cook

Peter Cook, CBE, FTSE, is a Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne, a company Director, consultant, senior advisor and author. He is one of Australia’s foremost scientists and technology leaders in the areas of energy, greenhouse technology and sustainability. As an expert in carbon capture and storage research he is a pioneer of CCS research and development in Australia, which is reflected in his role as Patron of the Peter Cook Centre for CCS Research.

Professor Cook has been a consultant and adviser on resource and energy issues in Australia, Finland, Greece, Germany, Japan, Netherlands and Portugal. He has been a consultant to NASA, various national governments, and a range of companies, and has served on Boards and Advisory Boards in Australia, the UK and for international bodies.

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Prof. Sally Benson

Sally M. Benson, who joined Stanford University in 2007, is the Precourt Family Professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering in the School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences. She is the Co-Director of the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage and the Stanford Carbon Removal Initiative. She is currently the Deputy Director for Energy and Chief Strategist for the Energy Transition at the Office of Science and Technology Policy within The White House.

Her studies focus on technologies and pathways to reducing greenhouse gas emissions including geologic storage of CO2 in deep underground formations and energy systems analysis for a low-carbon future.

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Prof. Ralf Haese

Professor Ralf Haese is an expert in aqueous geochemistry. He studies gas-fluid-rock reactions, reactive-transport in porous rocks and pore scale processes. He combines laboratory and field experiments with geochemical modelling. Most of his research is dedicated towards a better understanding and the development of technologies to ensure safe and efficient geological carbon storage. Recent studies addressed the following topics of geological carbon storage:

  • Changes in water composition and carbon mineralisation at reservoir scale
  • Development of a workflow to account for small-scale lithological heterogeneity in reservoir models
  • Self-sealing of fractures in basalt
  • The behaviour of tracers and CO2 impurities in field studies

Prof. Haese joined The University of Melbourne as Professor of Environmental Geochemistry in 2013. He was appointed as Director of the Peter Cook Centre for CCS Research in 2017. He served as Deputy Head, School of Earth Science, from 2019 to 2021 and has been graduate course coordinator since 2019. He teaches Environmental Geosciences and Hydrogeology & Environmental Geochemistry and supervises MSc and PhD students.

Dr. Jerome Neufeld

Jerome Neufeld is Professor of Earth and Planetary Fluid Dynamics at the Centre for Environmental and Industrial Flows, Department of Earth Sciences and Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, University of Cambridge. His research couples thermodynamics and fluid dynamics in multiphase systems within geophysical settings using analytical, numerical and experimental techniques. Current research is focused on the areas of multiphase flows in porous media including carbon sequestration, solidification and melting in magmatic systems and the cryosphere, on elastically dominated fluid flows in tectonic and cryospheric settings, and on the solidification of the lunar magma ocean and the generation of magnetic fields in early solar system planetesimals.

Prof. Hamdi Tchelepi

Hamdi Tchelepi is Professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. He is interested in numerical simulation of flow and transport processes in natural porous media. Application areas include reservoir simulation and subsurface CO2 sequestration. Current research activities include (1) modeling unstable miscible and immiscible flow in heterogeneous formations, (2) developing multiscale formulations and scalable solution algorithms for multiphase flow in large-scale subsurface systems, and (3) developing stochastic formulations for quantification of the uncertainty associated with predictions of flow and transport in large subsurface formations.

Prof. Stephan Matthai

Professor Stephan Matthai is Chair of Reservoir Engineering, Department of Infrastructure Engineering at The University of Melbourne. He is a geoscientist and reservoir engineer, researching the emergent behaviour of subsurface systems and their complex response to engineering measures. Advancing field-data based simulation methods, his research team investigates multiphase reactive fluid flow and the mechanics of heterogeneous geologic media.

Current engineering applications are the sequestration of greenhouse gases in deeply buried strata, geothermal energy extraction, enhanced oil recovery, and the prediction of contaminant transport in the subsurface. He also created the Complex Systems Platform (CSMP++) a software platform that enables field-data based simulation research of subsurface processes.

Prof. Michael Bickle

Michael Bickle is Emeritus Professor of Tectonics at the University of Cambridge. His research combines field based, petrological and geochemical research projects with physical modelling in order to understand better the important processes which control global evolution. His work on geological carbon storage includes studies on the CO2 injection in the Sleipner field in the North Sea, on a site with leaking natural CO2 at Green River, Utah, on sampling a real-time CO2 injection experiment, and modelling of multiphase flow of CO2 and brine in heterogeneous media to elucidate rates of capillary and dissolution trapping.

Prof. Louis Durlofsky

Louis Durlofsky is a Professor in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences at Stanford University. His research involves the development of computational methods for the effective management of subsurface flow operations, with applications ranging from the recovery of oil and gas to the geological storage of carbon dioxide. He co-directs the Stanford Smart Fields Consortium, the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage and the Stanford Reservoir Simulation Research Consortium.

Dr Adam Butler

Adam Butler is a postdoctoral researcher working in the Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre for Environmental and Industrial Flows at the University of Cambridge. I use reduced-order models to study subsurface fluid systems, looking in particular at what measurements of pore pressure and surface displacement can tell us about fluid and reservoir properties and heterogeneities.

Dr Julie Dickinson

Julie Dickinson is a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of Melbourne. She is also the project co-ordinator for GeoCquest. She is a geologist with a background in sedimentary basin analysis and has a broad range of research interests including, reservoir characterisation, sedimentary basin development and shallow drilling hazards. She is currently focused on the development of geomodels for CO2 storage.

Emily Flicos

Emily Flicos is a PhD student in the Department of Earth Sciences and the Centre for Environmental and Industrial Flows at the University of Cambridge. I’m using reduced order modelling to look at the sensitivity of a gravity current to the unknowns in an injection reservoir, for example the variations in permeability, with the aim of producing predictive maps for the risk of CO2 propagating a given distance. 

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Dr Jacques Franc

Jaques Franc is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University.

Dr. Achyut Mishra

Achyut Mishra is a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at The University of Melbourne. A geologist by training with specialization in reservoir modelling, multiphase fluid flow and reactive transport simulations. My research broadly involves the characterization and upscaling of sub-meter scale lithological heterogeneity and an assessment of its impact on carbon capillary and mineral trapping under CO2 storage conditions at reservoir scale. I utilize geostatistical and machine learning approaches in conjunction with simulation outputs to design new algorithms for integrating sub-grid cell heterogeneity in traditional reservoir modelling workflows. Currently, I am working on developing an artificial neural network-based reservoir screening tool for quantifying the effective pore space utilization capacity of a reservoir for CO2 storage.

Aman Raizada

Aman Raizada is a Ph.D. student in the department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University.

Dr Qi Shao

Dr Qi Shao holds the position of Research Fellow in Multiphase Flow Modelling in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at the University of Melbourne. His main research interest is numerical modelling of porous media flows, specifically around simulations of geological storage of carbon dioxide (CO2) and development/application of asynchronous time marching schemes. Qi’s work on CO2 geo-sequestration modelling, has extended DES to compositional simulations and integrating it into the CSMP++-based ACGSS (Australian CO2 Geo-Sequestration Simulator). He has applied the developed techniques and simulator to field-data based simulations, to investigate the behaviour of injected CO2 plume migration in the presence of multi-scale heterogeneities, in support of simulation-based storage engineering and optimisation of storage strategies and injection schemes for enhanced pore space utilisation and reservoir trapping.

Dr Catherine Spurin

Catherine Spurin is a postdoctoral researcher in the department of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University. I got my PhD from the Earth Science & Engineering department at Imperial College London, as part of the Digital Rocks Project. My current research is part of the GeoCquest project, and it focuses on maximising pore space utilization for the trapping of CO2 in the subsurface in reservoirs with varying heterogeneity. I explore this topic using X-ray CT imaging and numerical simulations. I am currently exploring the role of fluid injectivity on the amount of CO2 trapping in underground aquifers.  

AbdAllah Youssef

AbdAllah Youssef is a PhD candidate in the Department of Infrastructure Engineering at The University of Melbourne. I hold a Master of Science degree in Petroleum Engineering from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals. My current research is part of the GeoCQuest project. In the first phase of this project, I focused on quantification of the impact of geo-heterogeneity on CO2 plume migration in storage sites. This work is aimed at a better understanding of multi-phase flow at different length scales. My contribution lies in developing tensorial, rate-dependent saturation functions for reservoir simulation that take into account the influence of nested geo-heterogeneity at multiple scales, and different force balance ratios.

Amy Zou

Amy Zou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Energy Resource Engineering department at Stanford University. I hold both a B.S. and a M.S. degree in Petroleum Engineering from Texas A&M University. My current research interests are utilizing various techniques and optimization algorithms for CO2 injection well placement (including long reach horizontal wells) and injection rate control (e.g., time varying flow rates) optimization under constraints, investigating different brine co-injection schemes as methods to increase pore-volume utilization and accelerate trapping, and developing novel injection schemes such as foam injection or silica gels to create local flow barriers.

Contact us

Centre for CCS Research. McCoy Building. The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia

+61 3 8344 0323

info@geocquest.org

GeoCquest Coordination – The University of Melbourne
Centre for CCS Research. McCoy Building. The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010 Australia

University of Cambridge
BP Institute, Bullard Laboratories, Madingley Road, Cambridge, CB3 0EZ, UK

Stanford University
Department Energy Resources Engineering, Green Earth Sciences Building, Stanford, California 94305, USA