David Mohler, Senior Vice President, CTO, Duke Energy
Monday, April 15, 2013 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | Free and Open to All
China makes roughly 80% of its electricity by burning coal. That helps explain why Beijing’s skies darkened earlier this year in what some observers dubbed the “airpocalypse.” It also explains why China has become the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Now, even as China builds more coal-fired power plants than any other country, it’s scrambling to roll out technologies to burn that coal more cleanly — from anti-smog filters to systems to capture carbon dioxide and shoot it underground.
China has launched the world’s largest “clean coal” experiment. In this conversation, the top technology officers from China’s largest power company and from a U.S power company that's investing in that Chinese work will assess the state of cleaner coal-burning technology and its prospects for real-world rollout in China and around the globe.
Eric Redman, President & CEO, Summit Power Group, LLC
Monday, April 1, 2013 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | Free and Open to All
Carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) on a large scale is regarded by many climate scientists as one indispensable element of any global carbon-reduction strategy. It is axiomatic that there can be no large-scale CCS project without a ‘sink’ for the carbon. The excellent work already performed on various geological sinks demonstrates that several different types of sink appear well-suited to large-scale sequestration. However, it is equally true that large-scale carbon sequestration also requires large-scale carbon capture projects. Very few exist, and almost none in the electric power sector, which is a leading source of global carbon emissions.
Seattle-based Summit Power Group is attempting to change this by developing several very large scale CCS projects in the electric power sector, both in the US (e.g., the Texas Clean Energy Project, which will capture and sequester 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year) and the UK (e.g., the Captain Clean Energy Project, which will capture and sequester more than 4 million tons of CO2 per year). Eric Redman is the president and chief executive officer of Summit, and will discuss the technical, commercial, financial, permitting, and public policy challenges of trying to be a ‘first mover’ on commercial-scale CCS projects in the power sector.
Mark Lerdal, Hydrogen California and MP2 Capital
Monday, November 12, 2012 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | Free and Open to All
Hydrogen Energy California is a project for converting fossil fuels to hydrogen in order to generate clean power and manufacture low-carbon fertilizer products. HECA will be one of the first industrial complexes combining a large, commercial scale power plant and a low-carbon footprint fertilizer manufacturing facility, while capturing the carbon dioxide (CO2) from the fossil fuel to hydrogen conversion process. Utilizing the CO2 for fertilizer production and enhanced oil recovery increases domestic energy security, while simultaneously storing the captured CO2 permanently in the geologic formations where the oil was extracted. It is a project that offers California, the nation, and the world progress toward controlling global climate change, while providing enormous economic stimulus through construction and related jobs over the intermediate term and permanent manufacturing and related jobs over the long term.
Assessing Earthquake Risks From Hydraulic Fracturing for Geothermal Power, Natural Gas and CO2 Storage
Mark McClure, PhD in Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University; Assistant Professor (winter 2013), University of Texas
Monday, November 5, 2012 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | Free and Open to All
Scientists have been aware of human induced seismicity for decades. But attention to the issue has increased in recent years, as concerns have been raised for wastewater disposal, hydraulic fracturing, and CO2 sequestration. The importance of credible induced seismicity hazard assessment has never been higher.
In this talk, Mark McClure will summarize the fundamental physical processes of induced seismicity, provide an overview of the history of the field, and review some of the dominant ideas in induced seismicity hazard analysis. Then he will summarize two papers he recently wrote on the topic of induced seismicity during hydraulic stimulation in geothermal energy. The first demonstrates how a single variable, the degree of brittle fault development, can explain the huge variation in induced seismicity across a range of historical enhanced geothermal projects. The second uses coupled fluid flow and seismicity modeling to explain a variety of observations of induced seismicity from enhanced geothermal projects and demonstrates how modeling could be used for hazard analysis or even optimization. Last, Mark will explain the broader implications of his work for induced seismicity hazard analysis.
Sally Benson, Department of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University
Monday, January 9, 2012 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | Free and Open to All
In little more than a decade, carbon dioxide (CO2) capture from point source emissions and sequestration in deep geological formations has emerged as one of the most important options for reducing CO2 emissions. Two major challenges stand in the way of realizing this potential: the high cost of capturing CO2, and gaining confidence in the capacity, safety and permanence of sequestration in deep geological formations. Building on examples from laboratory and field-based studies of multiphase flow of CO2 in porous rocks; this talk addresses the current prospects for CO2 sequestration.
Which formations can provide safe and secure sequestration? At what scale will this be practical and is this scale sufficient to significantly reduce emissions? What monitoring methods can be used to provide assurance that CO2 remains trapped underground? What are the long-term risks of geological sequestration and how can they be managed? The status of each these questions will be discussed, along with emerging research questions.
TS Ramakrishnan (Rama), Scientific Advisor at Schlumberger-Doll Research , GCEP Distinguished Lecturer
Monday, April 18, 2011 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | NVIDIA Auditorium, Jen-Hsun Huang Engineering Center | Free and Open to All
We shall introduce the audience to the background behind CO2 accumulation, and infrared absorption for an understanding of global warming. Motivated by the requirement of CO2 sequestration, we shall focus on the theoretical analysis of interface evolution between immiscible fluids within a reservoir structure.
We derive the governing equations for the pressure and interface height to leading order, obtained in the limit of a thin gravity tongue and a moderately dipping bed. In the case of a horizontal bed, the interface shape is governed by a nonlinear parabolic equation that admits a similarity solution only for a specific initial condition. The same is true for a slightly dipping bed, but in a moving coordinate system. We show that for the inclined bed two-dimensional problem, in the reference frame moving with the mean gravity induced advection velocity, the interface motion is dictated by a degenerate parabolic equation, different from those previously published. In this case, the late-time behavior of the gravity tongue can be derived analytically through a formal expansion of both the solution and its two moving boundaries. In three dimensions, using a moving coordinate along the dip direction, we obtain an elliptic-parabolic system of PDEs where the fluid pressure and interface height are the two dependent variables. The solution features are identified for different combinations of dimensionless parameters, showing their respective influence on the shape and motion of the interface.
To conclude the presentation, we show illustrative examples of plume accumulation and migration in complex media, in both two and three dimensions.
- Zhi-Xun Shen, Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Science (SIMES)
- Sally Benson, Global Climate and Eneregy Project GCEP
- Stacey Bent, TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy
- Jim Sweeney, Precourt Energy Efficiency Center (PEEC)
- Frank Wolak, Program on Energy and Sustainable Development (PESD)
- Larry Goulder, Stanford Environment and Energy Policy Analysis Center (SEEPAC)
Wednesday, October 6, 2010 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All
Franklin M. ("Lynn") Orr, Jr. became the director of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford upon its establishment in 2009. He served as director of the Global Climate and Energy Project from 2002 to 2008. Orr was the Chester Naramore Dean of the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University from 1994 to 2002. He has been a member of the Stanford faculty since 1985 and holds the Keleen and Carlton Beal Chair of Petroleum Engineering in the Department of Energy Resources Engineering, and is a Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. His research activities focus on how complex fluid mixtures flow in the porous rocks in the Earth's crust, the design of gas injection processes for enhanced oil recovery, and CO2 storage in subsurface formations. Orr is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He serves as vice chair of the board of directors of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, and he chairs the Science Advisory Committee for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and was a foundation board member from 1999-2008.
Sequestering Carbon Dioxide in the Built Environment: a Revolutionary Cement Technology
Brent Constantz, President and CEO of Calera Corporation; Consulting Professor, Stanford University
Wednesday, February 18, 2009 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All
A Major New Initiative Focused on the Global Problem of Energy, and a conversation with distinguished panelists
President John L. Hennessy; Sally Benson, director, Global Climate and Energy Project; John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer, Google Inc.; Jim Sweeney, director, Precourt Institute for Energy Efficiency; Jane Woodward, chief executive officer, MAP and consulting professor, Stanford University; Moderated by Lynn Orr, founding director, Global Climate and Energy Project
Monday, January 12, 2009 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | | Free and Open to All
CO2 Sequestration: What Have We Found? What Should Future Priorities Be?
Tony Kovscek, Professor of Energy Resources Engineering, Stanford University
Wednesday, April 9, 2008 | 04:15 PM - 05:15 PM | Building 420, Room 40 | Free and Open to All
Anthony Kovscek, associate professor of Energy Resources Engineering at Stanford University University, discusses carbon sequestration and what our future priorities should be, including evaluation of coalbeds for potential carbon dioxide storage.Related Themes: