Dr. Mohan Kelkar, Chair of the Department of Petroleum Engineering at the University of Tulsa (UTulsa), recently visited the Bahrain Center for Strategic and International Energy Studies to speak about the energy transition. The audience, which included business representatives, local oil companies, and engineering societies, discussed pressing issues such as fossil fuels and the role of petroleum engineers in the energy transition.
Kelkar’s career spans more than 40 years, making his expertise essential to his field. “I believe we have a duty to let people know how difficult the energy transition is going to be and how long we will continue to use fossil fuels. This is just the first step,” he said.
There is a global transition to cleaner energy, which creates huge opportunities for petroleum engineers. Gas companies have a key role to play in this transition as they have a wealth of talent, including petroleum engineers, who can apply their knowledge to producing cleaner energy.
“Ultimately, their knowledge of the subsurface can be leveraged for other energy transition applications such as carbon dioxide (CO2) sequestration, which requires understanding how to design injection wells and how the captured CO2 plume moves within the reservoir,” Kelkar said.
UTulsa’s North Campus facility will be a hub for groundbreaking CO2 management research, working to reduce CO2 emissions and make the extraction process more efficient.
The future of the energy transition will require large-scale infrastructure development and policy-driven decisions to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. One example is the Oklahoma Carbon Sequestration Enhancement Act of 2009, which regulated the underground injection of captured CO2 and ensured its safe storage.
“Essentially, the Gulf of Mexico could very well become a place to source CO2 from a variety of different places and store it underground, permanently,” Kelker added.
