Solid Earth Science for the Energy Transition

For over thirty years, the Earth Resources Laboratory has been MIT’s home for earth science and engineering relevant to the energy industry. Each spring, we invite representatives of our Founding Member companies to MIT to hear about our latest research. This year, we are excited to open up the meeting to new potential collaborators in industry and at MIT as we develop innovative strategies for sustainably and responsibly addressing modern societal needs, such as carbon-free energy production, access to critical minerals, freshwater resources, and the safe, permanent storage of atmospheric CO₂.
In addition to presentations by MIT researchers, this year’s meeting will include brief talks by collaborators and prospective collaborators in industry and the non-profit space. Out keynote speaker will be Bradford Hager, the Cecil and Ida B. Green Professor of Earth Science and former director of ERL, who will share exciting new development in geologic hydrogen research at MIT.
If you would like to attend, please contact erl-info@mit.edu for the registration link.
Agenda (subject to change):
Date | Session | Start time | End time | Speaker | Title | Location |
Tuesday, 5/20/2025 | Welcome Reception | 6:30 PM | 8:30 PM | Building 54/55 Atrium | ||
Wednesday, 5/21/2025
|
Welcome/Overview | 9:00 AM | 9:20 AM | Oliver Jagoutz | Overview of ERL |
55-108/109/110
|
New Energy: Geothermal
|
9:20 AM | 9:50 AM | Ben Holtzman | Towards Deep Geothermal Heat Mining: Some open questions on a vast solution for the energy transition |
||
9:50 AM | 10:20 AM | Andrew Inglis | From Niche to Necessity: The Rising Role of Geothermal in Clean Energy | |||
10:20 AM | 10:50 AM | Hilary Chang | Induced earthquake characterization using distributed acoustic sensing | |||
Carbon Sequestration I | 10:50 AM | 11:20 AM | Oliver Jagoutz | Profitable biological carbon sequestration | ||
Coffee Break | 11:20 AM | 11:35 AM | ||||
New Mining
|
11:35 AM | 12:05 PM | Hervé Rezeau | Harnessing Mineral Chemistry to Find Porphyry Cu deposits | ||
12:05 PM | 12:35 PM | Iwnetim Abate | Earth as factory to produce clean fuels | |||
Lunch | 12:35 PM | 1:35 PM | ||||
New Energy: Geologic Hydrogen (Keynote) | 1:35 PM | 2:15 PM | Bradford Hager | Geologic hydrogen | ||
Short-form presentations: Industry / Philanthropy
|
2:15 PM | 2:30 PM | Angela Seligman (Clean Air Task Force) | The Clean Air Task Force approach to decarbonizing the global energy system | ||
2:30 PM | 2:45 PM | Smaine Zeroug (Schlumberger-Doll Research) | Repurposing Geosciences for the Energy Transition Domains | |||
2:45 PM | 3:00 PM | Nicole Iseppi (Bezos Earth Fund) | Earth Technologies to Advance Climate Solutions – Bezos Earth Fund Approach to Projects | |||
3:00 PM | 3:15 PM | Soraya Bornaz (Underground Ventures) | Accelerating the Energy Transition by Supporting Next-Gen Geothermal Technologies | |||
Coffee Break | 3:15 PM | 3:30 PM | ||||
Carbon Sequestration II
|
3:30 PM | 4:00 PM | Admir Masic | From Hot Mixing to Carbon Locking: Tracing Lime Cycle in Ancient Roman and Contemporary Concretes | ||
4:00 PM | 4:30 PM | Jonathan Simpson | Investigating geologic carbon mineralization with timelapse CT imaging experiments | |||
River/Harbor Dinner Cruise | 6:00 PM | 9:00 PM | Meet at MIT Sailing Pavilion 5:45PM | |||
Thursday, 5/22/2025
|
Multi-phase Physics
|
9:00 AM | 9:30 AM | Ruben Juanes | Scientific Machine Learning for Surrogate Modeling, Parameter Identification and Transfer Learning of Multiphase Flows in Porous Media: Application to the FluidFlower CO2 Injection Experiment |
55-108/109/110
|
9:30 AM | 10:00 AM | Kripa Varinasi | Innovation at Interfaces: A Ubiquitous Platform for Energy & Sustainability | |||
Short-form presentations part II
|
10:00 AM | 10:15 AM | Xin Cui | Understand the contact condition between casing and formation | ||
10:15 AM | 10:30 AM | Yuesu Jin | Application of fluid-filled crack model on trans-casing borehole acoustic logging | |||
10:30 AM | 10:45 AM | Laxman Kaffle | Electrical Rock Fracturing Techniques and Applications | |||
10:45 AM | 11:00 AM | Ignacio Arzuaga Garcia | Interaction mechanisms between hydraulic and natural fractures in Shale | |||
Coffee Break | 11:00 AM | 11:15 AM | ||||
Machine Learning for Imaging
|
11:15 AM | 11:45 AM | Sai Ravela | Novel application of machine learning for geothermal and seismic inversion | ||
11:45 AM | 12:15 PM | Luping Qu | Advanced CO2 Interpretation from 4D Sleipner Seismic Images using Swin-Unet3D | |||
Business Lunch | 12:30 PM | 2:00 PM | For representatives of Founding Member and prospective member companies. | 54-209 |