Geoscientists are at the forefront of the developing renewable energy projects in sectors such as wind, solar, hydrogen and geothermal energy. They will also be critical in advancing the field of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS). There is general agreement that the global Energy Transition will take longer than at first thought, but, as can be evidenced from some of the studies presented this month, projects are continuing apace.
Marianne Rauch and Leon Hamilton set out the global landscape for obtaining the battery minerals that the world urgently needs for a diversified and sustainable energy landscape.
Rodney Garrard argues that CCUS risk management should evolve from a philosophy centred on periodic verification towards one based on continuous assurance.
Luca Limonta et al present a depth-domain velocity-model-building workflow applied to a 92 km² UHR3D dataset from the East Irish Sea.
Andrew J Cavanagh et al demonstrate that answering the question of how much CO2 the world's saline aquifers can hold is, at basin scale, not a question about pore volume but about boundaries, and boundaries are the one property the global resource numbers assume rather than measure.
Jørgen Rasmussen et al proposes a conceptual framework of five geothermal technology stages and propose that the emergence of Enclosed Loop Geothermal Systems have the attributes to become the dominant geothermal design.
Elodie Morgan and Habib Al Khatib trace the ten-year adoption journey of focused seismic monitoring and identify four recurring stages of adoption – technical validation outside CCS, field proof, client buy-in, and external diffusion.
