December 2015 ESE Newsletter

ESE is out in force at the at the AGU Fall meeting San Francisco

Contents

Publications
Conferences, Lectures and Seminars
Impact and Media
Awards
Fieldwork
PhD Vivas

Publications

Armitage, J.J., Allen, P.A., Burgess, P.M., Hampson, G.J., Whittaker, A.C., Duller, R.A. and Michael, N.A. (2015). Sediment transport model for the Eocene Escanilla sediment-routing system: implications for the uniqueness of sequence stratigraphic architectures. Journal of Sedimentary Research, 85, 1510-1524. (DOI: 10.2110/jsr.2015.97)

Buchanan, Dennis L. (2015). Metals and Energy Finance, Imperial College Press, London.

Oostrom, M., White, M.D., Porse, S.L., Krevor, S.C.M., Mathias, S.A. Comparison of relative permeability-saturation-capillary pressure models for simulation of reservoir CO2 injection. International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, 45, 70-85. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1750583615301602

Holgate, N.E., Jackson, C.A-L., Hampson, G.J. and Dreyer, T. (2015). Seismic stratigraphic analysis of the Middle Jurassic Krossfjord and Fensfjord formations, Troll oil and gas field, northern North Sea. Marine and Petroleum Geology, 68, 352-380. (DOI: 10.1016/j.marpetgeo.2015.08.036)

Hommel, J., Lauchnor, E., Gerlach, R., Cunningham, A.B., Ebigbo, A., Helmig, R., and Class, H. (2015). Investigating the Influence of the Initial Biomass Distribution and Injection Strategies on Biofilm-Mediated Calcite Precipitation in Porous Media. Transport in Porous Media. DOI: 10.1007/s11242-015-0617-3.

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11242-015-0617-3

Jackson, C.A-L. and Lewis, M.M. (2016) Structural style and evolution of a salt-influenced rift basin margin: the impact of variations in salt composition and the role of polyphase extension. Basin Research. DOI: 10.1111/bre.12099.

Jolly, B.A., Lonergan, L., Whittaker, A.C. 2016. Growth history of fault-propagation folds and interaction with seabed channels in the toe-thrust region of the deep-water Niger Delta; Marine and Petroleum Geology 70, 58-76.

Paluszny, A., Tang, X.H., Nejati, M., Zimmerman, R.W. (2016). A direct fragmentation method with Weibull function distribution of sizes based on finite- and discrete element simulations. International Journal of Solids and Structures. doi: 10.1016/j.ijsolstr.2015.10.019.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0020768315004357

Wang, X., Jardani, A., Jourde, H.; Lonergan, L., Cosgrove, J.C., Gosselin, O., Massonnat , G. 2016. Characterisation of the transmissivity field of a fractured and karstic aquifer, Southern France, Water Resources Research 87, 106-121.

Conferences, Lectures and Seminars

The 2015 Fall AGU meeting in San Francisco was widely attended by members of ESE.

• Ian Bastow co-convened a NSF GeoPRISMS Mini-Workshop entitled “From rifting to drifting: evidence from rifts and margins worldwide" prior to this year’s AGU conference in San Francisco. He also chaired sessions on continental rifting and the development of Precambrian North America during the conference itself.
• Adrian Muxworthy, Trevor Almeida (who left ESE in November) and PhD-student Rabiu Abubakar gave presentations.
• Ajit Singh presented poster “Fluvial fan evolution during Late Quaternary climate changes: field and chronological constraints from the Indo–Gangetic basin”.
• Catriona Reynolds and Maartje Boon presented oral presentations “Observations of the Dynamic Connectivity of the Non-wetting Phase During Steady State Flow at the Pore Scale Using 3D X-ray Microtomography” and “3D Observations of Dispersion, Mixing and Reaction in Heterogeneous Rocks” respectively Peter Lai and Sam Krevor presented posters “Pore-scale Heterogeneity in the Mineral Distribution and Reactive Surface Area of Porous Rocks” and “The impact of reservoir conditions and rock heterogeneity on multiphase flow in CO2-brine-sandstone systems”. They also took an enjoyable trip to Pt. Reyes National Seashore, in Marin County.
• Members of the Basin Research Group were out in force at the meeting. Rebecca Bell and Adamu Suleiman gave oral presentations, and Craig Magee and Chris Jackson gave poster presentations. A special mention goes to undergraduate student Haydn Orme who presented a poster, detailing the results of her summer-2015 UROP project! Her attendance was supported by the London Petrophysical Society (LPS) and Imperial College Trust.
• The rock mechanics group gave three talks and one poster presentation. Robert Zimmerman gave an invited talk entitled "The effect of pressure dissolution and precipitation on fracture permeability and normal stiffness". Philipp Lang gave a talk entitled “Critically stressed fractures as conduits: mechanically-chemically-mediated anisotropy of the effective permeability of fractured rock”, based on his work, co-supervised by Adriana Paluszny, and funded by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. Saaed Salimzadeh gave a talk entitled "Fully coupled 3D finite model of hydraulic fracturing in a permeable rock formation", based on his work on the EPSRC-funded CONTAIN project. Anozie Ebigbo presented a poster entitled “Inclusion-based effective medium models for the permeability of a 3D fractured rock mass”, based on his work done within the NERC-funded HydroFrame project.

Robert Zimmerman gave the 2015 Maurice A. Biot Endowed Lecture at Columbia University on 11 December. The lecture is named for Maurice Biot, the father of the theory of poroelasticity, and professor at Columbia from 1937-45. Recent Biot lecturers have included Jim Rice (Harvard), Jean Prevost (Princeton), and Ronaldo Borja (Stanford). Robert's talk was entitled "The effect of pore structure, pore fluid, stress and frequency on the elastic wavespeeds in sandstones".

Adriana Paluszny gave an invited talk at the 23rd Hubbert Quorum at the USGS Menlo Park, California, on 13 December 2015. Adriana's talk was entitled "Modeling fracture growth and effective permeability tensor computation". Other speakers at the Hubbert quorum that day included Mark Zoback (Stanford), Bruce Yardley (Chief Geologist, NDA), and Andy Woods (Cambridge).

Krautter, Jean-Baptiste, Buchanan, D.L. and Worcester, C. (2015). A Technical and Financial Appraisal of a Gold Project in Canada’s Low Arctic. nstitute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. Conference on Minerals and Metals Production from Mine to Market. 15 -16 December, Cambridge.

Impact and Media

Throughout the last month Dick Selley has been involved in exchanges of robust letters in the Dorking Advertiser in which he disagreed with the local water board objection to a proposed oil well in the area because it may contaminate the aquifer. He argued that a larger concern was the danger of ground water pollution by nitrates produced by high intensity farming - incurring angry letters from local farmers.

Susie Maidment’s research into blood cells and collagen fibres found in dinosaur bone made it into Discover Magazine’s top 100 science stories of 2015.

Awards

Thomas Berndt received a British Council Newton Fund Grant for himself and his supervisor Adrian Muxworthy to visit the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing working with Prof. Greig Paterson.

Thomas Berndt and Sope Badejo both received NSF-funded, ten day Visiting Fellowships to the Institute of Rock Magnetism at the University of Minnesota.

Lizzie Day has been awarded fellowship of the higher education academy. 

Fieldwork

Cedric John and PhD student Martin Honig spent a week in the UAE and Oman 1-5 December conducting fieldwork after which Cedric John continued on to attend the International Petroleum Technology Conference conference in Doha. 

PhD student Martin Honig points out a bed of ooids on fieldwork at the Musandam Peninsula, Oman

PhD vivas

Morteza Nejati successfully defended his PhD thesis on 3 December 2015. Morteza's thesis was entitled "Finite element modeling of frictional contact and stress intensity factors in three-dimensional fractured media using unstructured tetrahedral meshes", and was supervised by Adriana Paluszny and Robert Zimmerman. His examiners were Prof. Lidija Zdravkovic from Civil Engineering, and Prof. Jon Trevelyan, Head of the School of Engineering and Computer Sciences at Durham.