Subsurface Energy
Goals
Energy has become one of the world's biggest engineering challenges. Current carbon-based energy supply faces conventional reserves depletion and climatic hurdles. The goal of this project is to address enhanced subsurface energy recovery and associated environmental mitigation from a geoengineering perspective. The team will study fundamental hydro-thermo-chemo-bio-mechanical properties of geomaterials and pore fluids at elevated pressure and temperature conditions. The team will participate to the National Gas Hydrate Research Program, the Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy (FORGE) Project, and NSF Engineering Research Center for Bio-inspired and Bio-mediated Geotechnics (CBBG).
Issues Involved or Addressed
Enhanced geothermal systems, bio-inspired heat exchanger, gas hydrate, geological carbon sequestration, microbial motility and their impacts on flow in porous media