Webinars
Welcome to the SCCS Webinars. Here you will find past webinar videos as well as accompanying materials.
What will it take to get to Net-Zero Emissions in California?
Speaker: Joshua Neutel, PhD Student, Stanford University
Date: March 7, 2024
Time: 12pm-1pm Pacific
Presentation slides found here.
Meeting the Challenges of Large-scale Carbon Storage and Hydrogen Production
Speaker: Mark Zoback, Benjamin M. Page Professor of Geophysics, Emeritus
Title: Meeting the Challenges of Large-scale Carbon Storage and Hydrogen Production
Recorded from a Live Webinar on May 23, 2023
About This Webinar
There is a pressing need to rapidly, and massively, scale up negative carbon strategies such as carbon capture and storage (CCS). At the same time, large-scale CCS can enable ramp-up of large-scale hydrogen production, a key component of decarbonized energy systems. We argue here that the safest, and most practical strategy for dramatically increasing CO2 storage in the subsurface is to focus on regions where there are multiple partially depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Many of these reservoirs have adequate storage capacity, are geologically and hydrodynamically well understood and are less prone to injection-induced seismicity than saline aquifers. Once a CO2 storage facility is up and running, it can be used to store CO2 from multiple sources. Integration of CCS with hydrogen production appears to be an economically viable strategy for dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade, particularly in oil- and gas-producing countries where there are numerous depleted reservoirs that are potentially suitable for large-scale carbon storage.
About the Speaker
Mark Zoback is the Benjamin M. Page Professor of Geophysics and the Director of the Stanford Natural Gas Initiative at Stanford University. He co-directs SCITS Stanford Center for Induced and Triggered Seismicity (SCITS) and the Stanford Center for Carbon Storage (SCCS). Dr. Zoback conducts research on in situ stress, fault mechanics, and reservoir geomechanics. He is the author/co-author of over 300 technical papers, holder of five patents and author of two books. Reservoir Geomechanics, published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 is now its 15th printing. His online course, also entitled Reservoir Geomechanics, has been completed by over 10,000 students around the world. His new book, Unconventional Reservoir Geomechanics, written with Arjun Kohli, is being released by Cambridge Press in April, 2019. Dr. Zoback has received a number of awards and honors, including the 2008 Walter H. Bucher Medal of the American Geophysical Union. In 2011 he was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering and in 2012 was elected to Honorary Membership of the Society of Exploration Geophysics. He was the 2013 recipient of the Louis Néel Medal of the European Geosciences Union and named an Einstein Chair Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2015 he received the Robert R. Berg Outstanding Research Award of the AAPG and in 2016 received the Outstanding Contribution to the Public Understanding of the Geosciences Award from the American Geological Institute.
Nations Agree to Sharm El-Sheik Implementation Plan - Summary Highlights of COP27
Speaker: Arthur Lee, Chevron Fellow and Principal Advisor
Title: Nations Agree to Sharm El-Sheik Implementation Plan - Summary Highlights of COP27
About This Webinar: What is the COP? What is the UNFCCC? Why do nations meet every year? I had these same questions when I first walked into COP5 Bonn in 1999. What was the Glasgow Climate Pact? How is that different from the Paris Agreement? What happened at COP27 Sharm El-Sheik? These are the continuing questions someone might ask now. I will address these questions in this webinar and share with you not only my recent observations at COP27, the several key decisions made by the over 183 nations, but also the historical context over twenty-plus years of my observations.
About the Speaker: Arthur Lee is a Chevron Fellow and Principal Advisor, in Environment and Climate Change, at Chevron Services Company, based in San Ramon, California. He has held positions of increasing responsibilities, including the corporation-wide formulation of strategic positioning and policy development on issues ranging from Chevron’s internal energy policy, US air pollution issues, to actions addressing climate change concerns.
Evaluating the Feasibility of Underground Hydrogen Storage as a Complement to Renewable Energy Production
Speaker: Dr. Rita Esuru Okoroafor, Post Doctoral Scholar, Stanford University
Date: June 28, 2022
Time: 12pm-1pm Pacific
Geomechanical Issues Affecting Long-Term Storage of CO2
Speaker: Mark Zoback, Stanford University Professor of Geophysics (Emeritus)
Date: January 25, 2022
Time: 12pm-1pm Pacific
About This Webinar:
The next several decades pose enormous challenges, and opportunities, for the global oil and gas industry. While oil and gas will continue to be used for decades to come, it is now recognized that enormous quantities of CO2 have to be stored in subsurface geologic formations to reach global decarbonization goals. International bodies, countries (including China and the U.S., the world’s two largest greenhouse gas emitters) and 25% of Fortune 500 companies have all established net-zero emission goals by mid-century. In this talk, I will focus on a number of geomechanical issues that have to be considered to ensure long-term storage efficacy. While it has been long recognized that changes in reservoir pressure should not exceed the pressure at which hydraulic fracturing might occur of seal formations, this presentation will focus on a number of other issues have not been sufficiently addressed. First, it is important to identify potentially active faults to limit the possibility that injection-related increases in pore pressure could induce seismic, or aseismic, slip on known faults. Also, as existing evidence shows that potentially active faults (and the damage zones that surround them) are permeable, the presence of potentially active faults represent possible leakage pathways that should be avoided, even when injection-related pressure changes are too small to induce fault slip. Second, when utilizing depleted oil and gas reservoirs for long-term storage of CO2, it is important to understand both the mechanical changes of the reservoir rocks and the stress changes that resulted from depletion. Such knowledge is required to predict how pressure associated with CO2 injection will affect the reservoir. Finally, from the perspective of induced seismicity, it is critically-important to identify reservoirs with both top seals and bottom seals to avoid pressure communication to potentially active faults in the basement.
Cement & Concrete Decarbonization Webinar
The cement & concrete industries provide a material fundamental to civilization. Cement is ubiquitous, extremely low-cost, robust, easy to use, and embedded in regulations worldwide which are meant to protect public safety. At the same time, the production of cement is responsible for around 7% of global CO2 emissions and is difficult to decarbonize since its production requires very high temperature heat (>1450 C) and >50% of emissions comes directly from the raw material itself (limestone). Increased focus on hard-to-decarbonize industries from governments and investors has pushed the industry to accelerate its efforts to reduce CO2. This has led to a proliferation of new technologies for low-CO2 cement and concrete, promoted by the increasing number of startups, national or university R&D centers, or individual and collaborative efforts of industry itself. Judging which technologies have the potential to be scalable to gigatons and deployable rapidly in the face of an industry with extremely low variable cost and $1 trillion of deployed capital stock is a key challenge for investors and regulators. Supporting those efforts with the financial resources and regulatory reform is critical to decarbonizing the global economy. This webinar will give a basic background in the technical and market aspects of the global cement and concrete industries; it will highlight recent developments on cement CO2 as well as existing and emerging technologies for decarbonization; and present a framework for thinking about the economic and industrial feasibility of emerging technologies and their potential impact.
CCSNet.Ai: A deep learning modeling suite to provide fast prediction for CO2 storage problems
CCSNet.ai was developed by Gege Wen at Stanford University, advised by Prof. Sally M. Benson. CCSNet predicts CO2 injection outputs in 2d-radial saline reservoirs using pre-trained convolutional neural network models. Refer to the paper and presentation below for detailed methodologies. Download the user manual and demo cases using the buttons below. In the event you encounter a case with problematic predictions, please kindly contact us at gegewen@stanford.edu and we will expand the training range to incorporate your case.
Citation: Gege Wen, Catherine Hay, Sally M. Benson, CCSNet: a deep learning modeling suite for CO2 storage, Advances in Water Resources, Volume 155, 1040090, 2021, doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.advwatres.2021.104009
Energy Seminar: Why CCS Matters in a Net Zero Emissions World
Speaker bio
Brad joined the Global CCS Institute as CEO in August 2011, bringing extensive knowledge and experience on Australian and international energy and climate policy issues.
Prior to the Institute, Brad spent almost eight years as CEO of the Energy Supply Association of Australia, steering the organisation through a period of significant transformation while representing members on a wide range of energy market and climate change policy issues. During much of this time he chaired the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Energy and Transport Sector Advisory Council.
Brad’s earlier career was in the Australian Public Service, working across a range of portfolios culminating in direct involvement at the senior executive level with the development, implementation and subsequent review and improvement of Australia's national electricity and domestic natural gas markets.
Brad graduated with a BA (Administration) from the University of Canberra and in 2009 studied the economics of climate change at Cambridge University as a British Council Chevening Fellow. In early 2018 Brad was appointed to the UK Government’s CCUS Council and has also recently joined the Special Advisory Group to the Board of the Norwegian CCS Research Centre.
Originally Presented on March 29, 2021
NPL Adapted to the CCUS Perimeter
Date: February 16th, 2021
Speaker: Jérôme Massot, Total R&D (working with Google and Stanford AI Lab)
Abstract: The number of academic and institutional articles published each year on the subject of Carbon Capture, Storage and Utilization (CCUS) is growing exponentially. If one searches on the words “Carbon storage” in Science-Direct, the Elsevier’s database Search Engine, more than 15,000 references are returned, with 500 of them published so far in 2021. It would be impossible for a scientist or researcher to read everything. This large corpus of available papers needs to be analyzed, curated and classified by sub-topic. The shared knowledge has to be extracted and summarized. And finally, only a fraction of articles need to be read to deepen technical understanding. To achieve these objectives, Neural Language Processing (NLP) can help. However, NLP requires a lot of data to be trained efficiently.
This webinar shows how the most recent NLP techniques associated to Knowledge Graph technology can bring benefits to the CCUS research community. The internal engine of each technique will be explained concisely and, as there is not good AI without good data, the data needed to obtain the best performances will be detailed for each. To conclude the webinar, several demos of existing knowledge extraction platforms will be shared in order to trigger an open discussion about which technology seems the more interesting for serving the CCUS researcher community.
https://github.com/ibm-aur-nlp/PubLayNet
https://www.connectedpapers.com
Brea Olinda CO2 Project Discussion
Date: July 1st, 2020
Speaker: Randall H. Breitenbach, Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Bridge Energy LLC
The Stanford Center for Carbon Storage hosted a workshop presentation and discussion with Randall H. Breitenbach, Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Bridge Energy LLC, on July 1st, 2020, regarding CO2 emissions of the Brea Olinda oil field in the Los Angeles basin, California.
The workshop discussed options for mitigating CO2 emissions from the Olinda landfill in the Brea Olinda oil field region. You may find the video presentation as well as the presented slides below.
Randy also cofounded Pacific Coast Energy Company, BreitBurn Energy Company and BreitBurn Energy Partners MLP, serving as CoChief Executive and Chairman of the Board from 1988 until his retirement in 2012. Randy also served as Chairman of Stanford University's PIC Endowment in 2007 and is currently a member of the Alternative Energy Investment Committee. Randy is also currently a member of the Carbon Capture Uses & Storage Roadmap Team “CCUS” reporting to the Department of Energy. Randy also serves as a Trustee and is currently Chairman of the Board for Hotchkis and Wiley Funds, a large mutual funds company. Randy holds both a B.S and M.S. degree in Petroleum Engineering (now Energy Resources Engineering) from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.
Utilizing Physics-Based Models to Manage the Risk of Injection Induced Seismicity Associated with Unconventional Oil And Gas Production
Date: June 11th, 2020
Speaker: Mark Zoback, Stanford University
Geoscience & Geoenergy Webinar Series
OGCI Climate Investments: $1B+ for a Sustainable Low-Emissions Future
Achieving the Paris Agreement requires a combination of innovation and practical action. The Oil and Gas Climate Initiative consortium, which represents 32% of global operated oil and gas production, created the $1B+ Climate Investments fund to invest for a sustainable low-emissions future. Our growing portfolio includes “hard to abate” sectors across industrials and commercial transport, and this talk highlights these and our approach to implementing impactful solutions.
Speaker Bio
Mark Coalmer is a 27-year veteran of project management and leadership. As CCUS Projects Director, he and his team at the $1B+ Climate Investments fund identify and advance promising projects and technologies to reduce atmospheric CO2. Mark has designed and led projects as an engineer and project manager and also managed teams of thousands implementing hundreds of concurrent projects in the US and Middle East. At Occidental he has served in a variety of roles that include Chief Facilities Engineer, Operations Manager for Permian, and most recently Director of Major Projects worldwide. An avid outdoor athlete, Mark holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from The Ohio State University.