Speakers
Plenary Speaker
Prof. George Moridis is a Professor of Petroleum Engineering and holder of the Robert L. Whiting Chair at Texas A&M University, which he joined in October 2016. His research interests include advanced numerical simulation methods for the description of coupled flow, thermal, geomechanical and geophysical processes, with particular focus on unconventional hydrocarbon resources. Before Oct. 2016, he was a Senior Scientist and the Head of the Hydrocarbon Resource Program in the Energy Geosciences Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, which he joined in 1991), was in charge of the LBNL research programs on unconventional resources (hydrates, tight/shale gas and oil), and lead the development of the new generation of LBNL simulation codes of coupled processes. Professor Moridis is still a Senior Scientist/Faculty Associate at LBNL and held the ExxonMobil Visiting Professor Chair in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering of the National University of Singapore for three years (2016-2019), in addition to being a visiting professor in the Guangzhou Center for Gas Hydrate Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; he is also an adjunct professor in the Chemical Engineering Dept. at the Colorado School of Mines, and in the Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering Dept. of the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
Professor Moridis has a BSc (1979) and MEn (1980) from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and a MSc (1982) and PhD (1986) from Texas A&M University. He is the author or coauthor of over 120 papers in peer-reviewed journals, 3 book chapters, 3 patents and more than 220 LBNL reports, conference paper and book articles. As of April 18, 2023, he has more than 18,000 citations with an h-index of 67. He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) for 2009–10, has been a SPE Distinguished Member since 2010, and received the SPE John Franklin Carll Award in 2019. He has been a member of the Methane Hydrate Advisory Committee to all US Secretaries of Energy since 2013 and is the recipient of a 2011 Secretarial Honor Award – the highest non-monetary award of the U.S. Department of Energy – for work on the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill Flow Rate Technical Group.
Keynote Speakers
Dr. Koji Yamamoto is currently the Vice President of JOGMEC, Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security, in charge of Technology, and has participated for several gas hydrate-related field projects. He received Ph.D. degree from Tohoku University, Japan, for geomechanics and acoustics, and worked for many drilling and reservoir geomechanics studies such as borehole stability, hydraulic fracturing and reservoir compaction. With regard to gas hydrate, he played a key role in 2007-2008 Mallik gas production operation in Canada, and 2013 and 2017 offshore production tests in Nankai Trough as R&D leader at the operation sites. Also, he was one of the leaders of MH21-S consortium for gas hydrate researches. He published many gas hydrate-related papers and made presentations in conferences. Currently he is interested in the role of gas hydrate resources in the coming carbon-neutral era.
Dr. Nengyou Wu is the Director of the National Engineering Research Center for Gas Hydrate Exploration and Development, and the Director of the Key Laboratory of Gas Hydrates of the Ministry of Natural Resources, China. He majored in Geology (B.S.,1988), Tectonics (M.S.,1991) at Zhejiang University and Geochemistry (Ph.D.,1999) at Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, CAS. He held a series of research positions at Guangzhou Marine Geological Survey in 1991-2008, was the Deputy Director of Guangzhou Institute of Energy Conversion, CAS in 2008-2015 and the Director General of Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology, CGS in 2015-2022. Dr. Nengyou WU has been the chief and co-chief scientist for numerous gas hydrate projects and involved in several gas hydrate drilling expeditions and two gas production tests from hydrate deposits in the northern South China Sea. He has been selected into the CAS Hundred Talents Program, the CGS Li Siguang Scholar, the distinguished expert of Taishan Scholar in Shandong Province, and the scientific and technological leader of the Ministry of Natural Resources, China.
Dr. Julie Morgan is currently the Flow Assurance global subject matter expert for Woodside Energy, based in Perth, Western Australia. Julie has over 35 years engineering experience, with more than 30 being spent working in the oil and gas business. She has worked in the UK, Europe, USA, Africa, and Asia-Pacific and has a PhD, MEng and MA in Chemical Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK.
Julie realised that she was a convert to flow assurance roughly 20 years ago and has been promoting the subject ever since. She is the current Program Chair for the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) Flow Assurance Technical Section (FTS). Julie is also a Fellow of the Society for Underwater Technology and sits on the SUT Council.
Prof. Rajnish Kumar, FRSC is a professor in the Department Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras. Prior to that he has served as senior scientist at CSIR-NCL, and research associate at National Research Council, Canada. His PhD is from The University of British Columbia, Canada and has research interests in gas hydrates, carbon dioxide capture, process development and scale-up. Work from his research group is well cited, and so far, they have published more than 100 research articles. Rajnish was recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher in the year 2018. Rajnish is also a recipient of NASI – Scopus Young Scientist Award in Chemistry for the year 2016. More recently in 2020, Rajnish received Dr. YBG Verma Award for Excellence in Chemical Engineering Teaching at IIT Madras. Rajnish sits in the editorial boards of many journals including, Energy & Fuels, ACS Engineering Au & Scientific Reports.