Events

DeFord Lecture | Geeta Persad

Climate Risk in an Era of Rapidly Evolving Human Emissions by Geeta Persad, assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin

KBH Energy Expo

The expo is designed to connect UT Austin students with the energy companies and professionals shaping the industry. Every company table includes a working professional (engineer, analyst, operator) alongside their recruiting team, so you can have real conversations about what it’s actually like to work in energy.

DeFord Lecture | Karen Wilcox

Digital Twins and Their Impact Across Science, Technology and Society by Karen Wilcox, director of the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin

2026 KBH Energy Center Energy Symposium

Headlined by Michael K. Wirth, Chevron CEO, and Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, this year’s Energy Symposium will convene industry leaders, faculty, and students for a series of insightful panel discussions. It will explore the industry’s most pressing challenges and emerging opportunities shaping the future of energy.

Bureau of Economic Geology Seminar Series

BEG Seminar presented by Xueying Xie, Ph.D. Principal and Director Subsurface Technology Simulation & Design of OXY, in person.

Topic: Overview of EOR in Unconventional Reserviours

Unconventional reservoirs retain substantial oil after primary depletion, but ultra-low permeability, heterogeneous rock properties, complex hydraulic-fracture networks, and conformance limitations reduce the effectiveness of conventional EOR methods. This talk reviews EOR technologies, key unconventional EOR challenges, and the current status of gas/CO2 and chemical huff-and-puff processes that leverage existing horizontal wells and stimulated reservoir volume. Main recovery mechanisms include oil swelling, viscosity reduction, vaporization, diffusion, miscibility above minimum miscibility pressure, interfacial-tension reduction, wettability alteration, and improved matrix-fracture fluid exchange. Field pilots in the Bakken, Eagle Ford, and Permian Basins, conducted by multiple operators using various injectants, have demonstrated measurable incremental oil response in unconventional reservoirs. Oxy is expanding EOR into unconventional reservoirs, representing a resource opportunity of more than 2 billion BOE, as highlighted in the Q3 2025 earnings call. Experience in the Permian Basin has demonstrated a practical pathway from laboratory evaluation to field deployment and commercialization, with pilots showing promising incremental oil production. The next milestone is to transition unconventional EOR from successful pilot projects to repeatable commercial-scale developments.

BEG Seminar will be in person, but also available on Zoom.

https://utexas.zoom.us/j/93201377630?pwd=KzF3TW53SFYzSUg4SUZVNGtxd3JvZz09

Meeting ID: 932 0137 7630

Passcode: 013011

DeFord Lecture | Alan Rooney

Re-Os Geochronology: A Journey from Mines to Meteorites by Alan Rooney, assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale University

Big Rivers on Mars!

What can ancient rivers on Mars reveal about the planet’s past and its potential for life? In this Hot Science – Cool Talks with Timothy Goudge, explore ancient rivers, catastrophic floods, and massive drainage systems on Mars, and how the planet’s lack of plate tectonics shaped its unique landscape and potential for life. By studying relic rivers and water-shaped landscapes on Mars, scientists are uncovering clues about the planet’s history and where life may once have had a chance to exist. After all, where waters flow, life often follows.

Bureau of Economic Geology Seminar Series

BEG Seminar presented by Tim Dixon, Director and General Manager IEAGHG and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, BEG. Join in person or via Zoom.

Topic: Global developments for CCS – the need increases

The world continues to develop the pathways for sound deployment of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), and now it appears CCS has an even bigger role than previously anticipated, specifically the geological storage part of CCS. This is because the latest science says that we are going to overshoot 1.5C and will need to do a lot of removal of carbon from the atmosphere if we want to return to 1.5C. This talk will provide an update on global developments in CCS.

Join Zoom Meeting:  https://utexas.zoom.us/j/93201377630?pwd=KzF3TW53SFYzSUg4SUZVNGtxd3JvZz09

Meeting ID: 932 0137 7630
Passcode: 013011

DeFord Lecture | Emily Brodsky

How Earthquakes Organize Stress by Emily Brodsky, professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz

Abstract: Stress is not uniform in the Earth. Therefore, we must use natural experiments to measure the distribution of stresses and related quantities, rather than single values. For instance, dynamic triggering shows that faults are uniformly distributed over their loading cycles in Southern California. The probability that a fault ruptures across a barrier measures the in situ energy distribution. Fault roughness reflects the distribution of strength. These natural experiments produce observable distributions that are surprisingly consistent and suggest some degree of self-organization in the Earth’s crust. Once established, the functional form of the distributions can be used to track changes in response to earthquakes as well as to distinguish fundamentally different fault systems. Transient fault locking before stress release in laboratory experiments can be interpreted as a consequence of self-organization of fault stress. The robust self-organization of multiple variables in earthquake systems suggests that the most consequential mechanical outcome of earthquakes may be the redistribution of stress and the strain energy associated with it. The low friction on a fault during seismic slip as inferred by temperature measurements of the Tohoku earthquake is consistent with dissipation playing a secondary role to this redistribution process. Through stress redistribution and interaction, subduction zone faults tend to synchronize, perhaps due to their geometric simplicity, while the continental system of Southern California cannot synchronize, perhaps due to the complexity of the fault network. Earthquakes organize stress in the crust and produce a suite of well-defined, consistent distributions.