Welcome to ECMOR 2024

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 7 “Affordable & Clean Energy” can only be achieved with mathematical modelling and simulation as an enabler, helping us to discover ways to manage the subsurface sustainably despite competing and intensifying interventions, such as energy extraction and storage, mining, water abstraction, waste disposal, and carbon geo-sequestration. Risking, uncertainty estimation, field-development planning, and optimisation of engineering measures all rely on mathematical modelling and simulation. The latter is indispensable also because it permits to investigate the emergent behaviour of subsurface systems including early detection of unwanted side effects of engineering measures. Its synergies with artificial intelligence applications have accelerated progress in this domain. However, major challenges such as the decarbonisation of the global economy lie ahead as captured by the Sustainable Development Goal 13 “Climate Action”. We believe that mathematical modelling and simulation of the subsurface play a vital role for finding the sustainable engineering solutions needed to achieve both SDG 7 and 13.

For more than 30 years, ECMOR has brought together applied mathematicians, engineers and geoscientists from academia, government, and industry, who share an interest in the numerical modelling of underground geologic systems. ECMOR has a tradition of featuring significant scientific and engineering breakthroughs in its focus areas. In this coming ECMOR, we highlight the importance of CO2 capture and geosequestration as a means to halving global emissions into the atmosphere. This quest motivates the one-day workshop on the fundamentals and state of the art of CO2 geo-sequestration. As the number of such projects increases rapidly, international experts will help us understand emerging knowledge, practices, modelling and simulation needs. While this event will be of interest to scientists and engineers who already have some experience with CO2-storage, it also aims to engage those unfamiliar with, but interested in, this topic, whether they have a background in mathematics, computer science, AI, geosciences or reservoir engineering.

In addition, ECMOR 2024 invites contributions to new topical sessions on machine learning, open software development, and hydrogen storage.

From the 2020 event organised online with around 200 participants from over 20 countries and 6 continents, to the hybrid 2022 event in The Hague with more than 100 participants from 22 countries, ECMOR 2024 returns to its original format of an in-person event attracting experts from all over the world for live discussions. We look forward to receiving your abstracts and to seeing you in Oslo!

Stephan Matthai & Arne Skorstad 

Co-chairs, ECMOR 2024