This Environmental Assessment and Optimization (EAO) Group focuses on building tools to reduce the environmental impacts of energy systems. The current group focus is on understanding greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) from fossil energy systems.  Our approach includes building engineering-based bottom-up life cycle assessment (LCA) models to generate rigorous estimates of environmental impacts from energy extraction and conversion technologies.  Also, we build optimization tools to improve the environmental and economic performance of energy systems.

Our methods are applied primarily to transportation fuels, in an effort to understand and reduce the environmental impacts of conventional petroleum and substitutes for conventional petroleum (e.g., oil sands, oil shale).  We are also currently developing optimization capabilities for carbon dioxide capture and storage technologies.  A third area of interest is in the mathematical modeling of petroleum resource depletion and the shifts to alternative energy resources.

A broad range of fundamental scientific questions must be addressed to consider implementation of large-scale projects of geological CO2 storage and sequestration within the next several decades. Building upon the successful CO2 storage research undertaken over the past eight years in the Global Climate and Energy Project, twelve Stanford professors from the Departments of Energy Resources Engineering, Geological and Environmental Sciences and Geophysics have established a new research consortium: The Stanford Center for Carbon Storage (SCCS) investigates questions related to sequestration in saline aquifers and shale and coal formations, as well as in mature or depleted oil and gas reservoirs as part of enhanced recovery/sequestration/storage projects. This collaborative and multidisciplinary effort addresses critical questions related to flow physics and chemistry, simulation of the transport and fate of CO2 in geologic media, rock physics, geophysical monitoring, and geomechanics.

Our aim in SFC is to develop efficient software tools for the optimization of oil field development and operations. This includes a wide range of algorithms for optimization, data assimilation and model updating (history matching), fast flow simulation, and handling uncertainty. Techniques being developed by our group are essential for the success of smart fields, also known in industry as i-fields, e-fields, integrated operations, field of the future, etc. Traditional approaches for developing and operating oil and gas fields are rarely optimal, and the gains achieved by deploying these new technologies can be very significant for both existing and new fields. The computational techniques developed in SFC are also applicable for optimizing geological carbon storage operations as well as large-scale integrated energy systems.

Additional Affiliated Faculty: Victor Pereyra, Michael Saunders, Benjamin Van Roy, Yinyu Ye

The research of SUPRI-A is relevant to so-called unconventional resources that are hard to produce with conventional techniques. Unconventional resources of current interest to the group are heavy and viscous oils and fractured, heterogeneous porous media containing hydrocarbons. With respect to the future significant new effort is envisioned. In addition to the dynamics of unstable flows, we plan an examination of the role of noncondensable gases on the gravity drainage of viscous oil from heterogeneous media. We will continue our efforts to develop cost-effective methods to produce oil and gas from tight rocks, such as diatomite, siliceous shale, and coal as well as consider the use of polymers and surfactants to enable cold production.