Dr. Stefan Bachu Joins Alberta Research Council’s Carbon Management Team

July 23, 2008 - Edmonton

Dr. Stefan Bachu, an internationally recognized expert in carbon storage, has been appointed Principal Scientist on CO₂ Geological Storage at the Alberta Research Council (ARC).

Dr. Bachu is currently Senior Advisor for Energy and CO₂ Geoscience at the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board (ERCB), and will join ARC August 1, 2008. He has spent over a decade researching carbon storage, and over 20 years researching the subsurface flow of fluids and heat in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin.

Dr. Bachu holds advanced degrees in water resources, hydrogeology and transport processes. He has participated in several national and international carbon management initiatives:

• Member of the federal government’s Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) panel for greenhouse gas mitigation
• Lead author of CO₂ geological storage chapter for the IPCC Special Report on CO₂ Capture and Storage, for which he shares, with other contributors, in the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to IPCC in 2007.
• Member of the technical working group of the Canada-Alberta ecoEnergy Task Force on Carbon Capture and Storage.
• Canadian representative on the technical group of the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), where he chaired the CSLF task force on CO₂ Storage Capacity Estimation.
• Member of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission Task Force on CO₂ Storage, representing ERCB and Canada.

In addition to these activities, Dr. Bachu is associate editor (for CO₂ geological storage) of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, and has been an adjunct professor at both the University of Calgary and the University of Alberta. Dr. Bachu has published more than 150 papers in journals and conference proceedings, and made more than 230 presentations at various conferences and symposia, of which almost half are on the subject of CO₂ geological storage.

For 15 years, Dr. Bachu was head of the energy section of the Alberta Geological Survey, which was part of ARC before it was transferred in 1996 to ERCB. Dr. Bachu received his doctorate in civil engineering at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and is a member of the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists of Alberta (APEGGA), Professional Engineers Ontario (PEO) and the American Geophysical Union.