This post will serve as a update as to how I’ve been keeping busy since the completion of my PhD at ETH Zurich, consolidating impressions from various geothermal-related conferences and short courses around the world. After my PhD defense last summer, I was employed for a brief stint (4 months) as a post-doc, tasked with finalizing the thesis and finishing up some papers. I also prepared and submitted some grant applications which I learned towards the end of the year would not be awarded. Alas, although it was unfortunate, it really shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. The funding environment in academia is cut-throat and hypercompetitive.

For the next months or so living with my wife (an academic herself) in Copenhagen while I pursued work opportunities in industry and academia. In retrospect, having already lined up the next job (more on that later), I can now say with confidence that the in-between-days have not always been easy. But I knew from the onset of unemployment that is was important to keep busy reading, actively conducting research, writing papers, and moreover, to have some work-related travels planned out, so I would have something to look forward to and wouldn’t be hanging out in the apartment day-in, day-out. So - besides creating this website - here is what I’ve been up to the last few months.

In February, I traveled to Palo Alto for the Stanford Geothermal Workshop. Unfortunately, I didn’t decide to attend the workshop until December, which was too late to submit an abstract. Luckily, I have some family living in Palo Alto with whom I could stay. This was my second time at the workshop - it was great seeing familiar faces (mostly from Iceland) and meeting some new people in the geothermal industry and academia. I enjoyed the inaugural session which (as a matter of tradition) highlights the work done at the Stanford group (Carla Co, Anna Suzuki and others). Under the leadership of Prof. Horne, this group explores techniques for investigating geothermal fluid properties and fractured reservoirs on the frontiers of conventional modes of reservoir engineering. Whoever thought that DNA barcoding and 3-D printing could be applied to the study of geothermal systems? Other highlights included Patrick Dobson’s talk on supercritical geothermal systems, particularly insofar as it highlighted to me the interest of the Japanese in exploiting these types of systems, and Mark White and Mark McClure’s work conduct benchmarking tests for simulation of fluid injection-induced seismicity in EGS. In addition, I was also heartened to see a presence from the Iceland School of Energy, where I attended in 2009-2011 back when it was still called REYST. In fact, little did I know, Cari Covell’s talk on statistical methods for analyzing inputs for high-temperature reservoir characterization laid out the basics for a project for which I would apply as a post-doc a few months later!

Soon after returning to Copenhagen from the Stanford workshop, I flew back to California to attend a workshop in San Diego about corrosion-related challenges in drilling and production in geothermal systems. Although the main focus of the workshop was on drilling fluids and materials-engineering, as a geoscientist I attended was interested to acquaint myself with the practical challenges related to the exploitation ‘supercritical’-type reservoirs. While I learned a lot about a whole variety of scaling and corrision concepts, the properties of different materials, I was somewhat surprised about the lack of discussion regarding the temperature, enthalpy and composition of target fluid resources and how they would impact production challenges. My experience at the conference left me with the belief that there remain important basic geoscientific contributions that need to be made to understand the geological/reservoir conditions that contribute to scaling and corrision. Sometimes it seems like geothermal geoscientists and engineers conduct their analyses of geothermal systems on fundamentally different planes. It is clear, however, that successful exploitation of geothermal systems requires knowledge from both of these levels is necessary for successful exploitation. On a personal level, I was pleasantly surprised to see my good friend Siggi Markusson at the conference. We had a nice walk around La Jolla, and met my buddies’ girlfriend for a nice meal. I was also glad to meet Sigrun Karlsdottir at the conference.

In late May, I attended a short course in Geothermal Reservoir Engineering at the International Geothermal Academy in Bochum, Germany taught by Dr. Saddiq Zarrouk. While a lot of the material was review for me, it was really interesting to gain perspective from the New Zealand approach to geothermal systems. However, in some ways, the workshop left me with more questions than answers. For example, how does one decipher the meaning of empirical well tests, and what rock- and fluid-related assumptions are implicit in their analyses. What’s the value of calculating a reservoir permeability based on the assumption of a homogenous reservoir rock and an isothermal, incompressible fluid?

Now, I’m happy to announce that I starting a post-doctoral position at Reykjavik University doing data fusion for geothermal reservoir characterization. The plan is to apply Bayesian statisticals and Markov Chain Monte Carlo techniques to design an assembly of geologically-realistic models that incorporate the natural variability in rock properties. I’m excited to see what the future will bring.