Keynote Speakers

The conference features keynote presentations from different industries (petroleum, CO2 storage and radioactive waste disposal) and academia, with a wide range of backgrounds (geology, petroleum engineering, petrophysics, geophysics, modelling, geomechanics and geochemistry) to share experiences in this field.

Keynote: De-risking top seal and fault integrity for geological carbon storage projects

Prof. Andreas Busch leads the GeoEnergy research group at Heriot-Watt University since joining in 2016. Prior to moving to Edinburgh, he worked in R&D at Shell Global Solutions in Rijswijk, the Netherlands, coordinating several large scale research projects combining theoretical, laboratory and field based work. As a geologist, he aims at bridging natural sciences towards engineering and integrates fluid transport and migration with geochemistry, petrophysics, physical chemistry, geomechanics and geology to understand and de-risk geological carbon storage, geothermal energy production as well as hydrogen storage. This involves laboratory, field and analytical/numerical modelling to upscale problems to the reservoir scale.

Technical University Munich

Keynote: Fault and top seal evaluation in deep geothermal energy – redundant or an opportunity?

Michael’s research is focused on geological and geomechanical topics in deep geothermal energy exploration, drilling and production. In 2016, he returned to German academia from the petroleum industry, where he worked as a top seal evaluation and pore pressure specialist at ConocoPhillips (Texas). Michael received his PhD within the Caprocks JIP from Newcastle University for studying the change of effective flow properties of shales and mudstones during mechanical compaction and currently holds a Professorship for Geothermal Technologies at the Technical University of Munich.

Keynote: Gigatonne-scale CO2 storage: analytical frameworks for optimizing multiple projects in sedimentary basins

Philip Ringrose is a specialist in CO2 storage and reservoir geoscience at the Equinor Research Centre, Trondheim, Norway. He is also Adjunct Professor in CO2 Storage at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and a leader in the Centre for Geophysical Forecasting based at NTNU. He has published widely on reservoir geoscience and flow in rock media and has published textbooks on ‘Reservoir Model Design’ and ‘How to Store CO2 underground.’ He was elected as the 2014-2015 President of the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) and in 2018 he was appointed as Honorary Professor (Sustainable Geoenergy) at the University of Edinburgh, School of Geosciences, Edinburgh, UK.

University of Oslo

Keynote: Fault characterization challenges and recent advances in deep learning

Anita Torabi is a professor in structural geology at the University of Oslo, Norway. She has earlier been aprincipal researcher at NORCE, Norwegian Research Centre. She was principal researcher (2015-2018)and geoscience research leader (2016-2018) as well as senior researcher (2008-2015) at Uni ResearchCIPR (Centre for Integrated Petroleum Research). She holds a Ph.D. in geosciences from the University ofBergen, Norway (2008). She has successfully led several interdisciplinary scientific projects andsupervised many PhD, post-doc and Master students. Her main research interests include mechanismand mechanics of faulting; fault-related folding; fluid flow in deformed reservoirs; and diagenesis in faultzone. She uses a variety of scales and methods in her research including outcrop and seismic studies,geostatistics, experiments, as well as machine learning.

Keynote: Energy transition challenge and expectations for geoscientists and subsurface engineers