Annual Founding Members Meeting 2025


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):

Printable Agenda

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