PE Distinguished Seminar: Dr. Rajesh Pawar, Senior Scientist and Engineer from Los Alamos National Lab

CCUS – The need for it and its current status

Capture of Carbon dioxide (CO2) and its storage or utilization (CCUS) is one of the technologies that will be part of the portfolio of solutions needed to reduce anthropogenic emissions of CO2 in response to climate change. There have been extensive research, development and demonstration (RD&D) efforts to facilitate its large scale deployment. Globally, multiple commercial scale CCUS projects are currently in operations and multiple are in the planning stages. During this talk I will provide an overview of CCUS and its current deployment status. I will introduce some of past R&D efforts relevant to various aspects of geologic CO2 storage and future R&D needs. I will also highlight my past and ongoing collaborations with the Mines faculty over last two decades focused on different aspects of geologic CO2 storage.

Rajesh Pawar (Ph.D.) is a senior scientist and engineer at Los Alamos National Laboratory with 20 years of experience in CO2 Capture, Utilization & Storage (CCUS) research, primarily focused on geologic CO2 storage and utilization. He leads LANL’s efforts focused on accelerating large-scale deployment of CCUS technology to mitigate greenhouse gas induced climate change. His technical research is primarily focused on complex fluid flow dynamics and coupled processes in subsurface, novel approaches for long-term predictions of complex engineered and natural earth systems, model reduction techniques for multi-phase fluid flow, machine learning based approaches for predictions of uncertain systems, uncertainty quantification in subsurface system, parameter estimation & data assimilation.