October 22nd, 2015

Thanks to shale gas, cheap and plentiful natural gas has led to new attention and interest in various natural gas monetization options. One promising option is the production of methanol using small-scale plants, which offer many advantages. The first advantage is that methanol prices track those of oil thereby providing a significant arbitrage to exploit if the natural gas feedstock is available as cheaply as it is in the U.S.

October 6th, 2015

This talk describes progress toward CO₂ recycling as a defense for global climate change.   Presently the world is making great strides in reducing CO₂ emissions, but this merely delays rather than prevents CO₂ buildup in the atmosphere.  CO₂ recycling, on the other hand, offers the possibility of actually stopping CO₂ buildup.  And it could be done economically and without people needing to make major lifestyle changes.  This talk will provide an overview of the present technology, and describe a roadmap to

September 22nd, 2015

August 12th, 2015

Guest Speaker:  FELCHESMI MRAMBA, MANAGING DIRECTOR - TANESCO.

September 10th, 2015

In order to meet targets set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to limit the most severe effects of climate change, levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere must not exceed 450 parts per million. While fuel switching, energy efficiency, and conservation are critical pillars to reduce CO₂ emissions, they are insufficient to deal with fugitive emissions or cancel out past emissions.

August 3rd, 2015

July 16th, 2015

The Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC) at the Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin has been a leader in CCUS research for over a decade.  The GCCC gained extensive experiences in site characterization, project design and execution, and monitoring from several CO2 injection and EOR projects in the Gulf Coast Region. The GCCC has also been studying the prospects of CO2 sequestration and EOR in Texas offshore and recently completed a characterization project for site characterization in Gul of Mexico.

June 23rd, 2015

The U.S. Department of Energy is a world leader in the development of CCS technology.  The DOE CCS/CCUS program, however, has not yet achieved critical mass.  There is a need for a substantial increase in the number of large scale demonstration projects for both capture and storage technologies before either system even approaches commercialization.  The National Coal Council recently completed a report for the U.S. Secretary of Energy that provides recommendations on how to accelerate the deployment of CCS technologies.

June 30th, 2015

Using a projection modeling system developed by MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, the Integrated Global System Model (IGSM), we provide an integrated assessment of how human activities, given our current development path, are interacting with complex Earth systems and ultimately affecting the natural resources on which we depend.

July 9th, 2015

In recent years, there has been a strong focus on increasing the amount of renewable power generation on the U.S.