Programs & Centers

The Center for Energy Economics (CEE) seeks to educate stakeholders on energy economics and commercial frameworks using comparative research to facilitate energy development. Research focus is on frameworks for commercially viable energy projects and the business-government interface.

The Center for Injection and Seismicity Research (CISR) is a research center at The University of Texas Jackson School of Geoscience’s Bureau of Economic Geology. The goal of CISR is to conduct leading science and application on the impacts of large-scale injection on the subsurface and surface environment. CISR applies geology, seismology, hydrogeology, geomechanics, and satellite geodesy to study how reservoirs respond dynamically to fluid injection. The goal is to characterize the intersection of natural factors and anthropogenic drivers that cause dynamic change to reservoirs so that stakeholders can mitigate the hazard of induced earthquakes, threats to the surface environment, and challenges to sustainable energy development.

The Center for Integrated Earth System Science (CIESS) is a cooperative effort between the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Cockrell School of Engineering. The center fosters collaborative study of Earth as a coupled system with focus on land, atmosphere, water, environment, and society.

The Center for Planetary Systems Habitability is an interdisciplinary research center at UT and is the result of a partnership between the Jackson School, the College of Natural Sciences, and the Cockrell School of Engineering. The center advances our ability to search for life on other planets by collaborating on research that helps better understand where habitable zones develop and how they evolve within planetary systems.

The Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC) seeks to apply its technical and educational resources to implement geologic storage of anthropogenic carbon dioxide on an aggressive time scale with a focus in a region where large-scale reduction of atmospheric releases is needed and short term action is possible.

In its 84th and 85th legislative sessions, the Texas Legislature tasked the Bureau with helping to locate and determine the origins of earthquakes in our state and, where possibly caused by human activity, with helping to prevent earthquakes from occurring in the future. The TexNet Seismic Monitoring Program was established to accomplish these goals.

A 266-acre living classroom in the Texas Hill Country, the White Family Outdoor Learning Center hosts a variety of hands-on education opportunities, and a series of ongoing research projects, data collection, and long-term monitoring activities.

The Advanced Energy Consortium facilitates research in micro- and nanotechnology for recovery of hydrocarbons from new and existing reservoirs. The primary goal is to develop intelligent subsurface micro and nanosensors that can be injected into reservoirs to characterize the space in 3D and improve recovery of resources.

The Applied Geodynamics Laboratory (AGL) is dedicated to producing innovative new concepts in salt tectonics. This research comprises a mix of physical and mathematical modeling and seismic-based mapping and structural-stratigraphic analysis of some of the world's most spectacular salt basins.

The Center for Sustainable Water Resources conducts studies related to water quantity and quality aspects of water resources at local scales using field studies and regional scales using remote sensing and at annual to millennial timescales. Impacts of land use change and climate variability/change are important drivers considered in these studies. The results of these studies will have important implications for development of sustainable water resource programs in different regions.

The Fracture Research and Application Consortium (FRAC) is an alliance of scientists from the Bureau and the departments of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering and Geological Sciences that seeks fundamental understanding of fractures and fracture processes dedicated to conquering the challenges of reservoir fractures.

The UT Gulf Basin Depositional Synthesis Project (GBDS) is an ongoing, industry-supported, comprehensive synthesis of Cenozoic fill of the entire Gulf of Mexico basin. The results are distributed as a digital data base that is updated regularly. The project has led to major new contributions to the understanding of the depositional history and framework of the Gulf of Mexico Basin. The project has focused on refining sequence correlations between the continental margin and deep basin stratigraphies, mapping sedimentary transport axes and paleogeographies through time, defining the evolving roles of submarine canyons, retrogradational margins, and shelf-margin delta systems in localizing in time and space sand transport to the slope and abyssal plain, and better understanding regional controls on reservoir facies and their deposition.).

The High-Resolution X-ray Computed Tomography Facility at The University of Texas at Austin (UTCT) is a national shared multi-user facility supported by the Instrumentation and Facilities Program of NSF's Earth Sciences (EAR) directorate, and also supported by NASA as a Planetary Sciences Enabling Facility. UTCT offers scientific researchers across the earth, biological and engineering sciences access to a completely nondestructive technique for visualizing features in the interior of opaque solid objects, and for obtaining digital information on their 3D geometries and properties.

The LEAD group consists of graduate research assistants, postdoctoral fellows, research scientists and visiting scholars. We view the earth system in a holistic way, linking the atmosphere, ocean, biosphere, cryosphere, and solid earth as an integrated system. We use powerful methodologies such as satellite remote sensing and supercomputing simulations which are now profoundly changing research in earth system sciences. We place a strong emphasis on the societal impact of the research in earth system sciences.

The Mudrock Systems Research Laboratory (MSRL) is dedicated to the twin goals of unraveling fundamental scientific aspects of the most common sedimentary rock type and devising applications of this understanding to the characterization of an important and growing unconventional resource.

NPL was created in 1999 as an answer to the increasing conservation and curation issues developing with the huge increase in collection size. Collections placed in the care of TNSC mainly were derived from research at the BEG, the UTDGS and the Museum (TMM) itself. Other material came from orphaned collections within Texas. Numerous other collections have been contributed as donations. Although an exact count has never been made, the collection is estimated to contain about 4 million specimens.

A program of research into plate tectonics and geologic reconstructions, the PLATES Project is supported by an industry consortium. Our primary objectives are to model past and present plate movement, compile comprehensive databases, develop plate motion computer software and apply plate motion models.

The Quantitative Clastics Laboratory (QCL) carries out geologic studies of the processes, tectonics, and quantitative morphology of basins around the world, with research that emphasizes the use of mega-merged 3D seismic data sets for quantitative seismic geomorphologic study of the basin fill, evaluation of source-to-sink relationships between the shelf, slope and deep basin and analyses of the influence of tectonics and fluids on the evolution of these complex continental margin settings.

The Reservoir Characterization Research Laboratory (RCRL) seeks to use outcrop and subsurface geologic and petrophysical data from carbonate reservoir strata as the basis for developing new and integrated methodologies to better understand and describe the 3-D reservoir environment.

RioMAR is a collaborative research project between Colorado School of Mines and The University of Texas at Austin focused on shelf & shelf-margin clinoforms, supported on a year-to-year basis by Industrial Associates. The companies (see Sponsors) are interested because we provide them with outcrop images and data that can be useful analogs for their work with subsurface reservoirs in different parts of the world.

The STARR Mission is to conduct geologic research that results in increasing the production and profitability of oil and gas in the state of Texas.

Structural diagenesis is a new perspective on interaction of mechanical and chemical processes at high crustal levels in the Earth. SDI promotes the growth of this new discipline.

The mission of the Texas Consortium for Computational Seismology is to address the most important and challenging research problems in computational geophysics as experienced by the energy industry while educating the next generation of research geophysicists and computational scientists.

The UT GeoFluids studies the state and evolution of pressure, stress, deformation and fluid migration through experiments, theoretical analysis, and field study. This industry-funded consortium is dedicated to producing innovative concepts that couple geology and fluid flow.

The mission of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory is three-fold, involving research, conservation, and education pertaining to the history of vertebrates. In particular, VPL focuses on the history of vertebrates in Texas and adjacent regions, but much broader studies are also conducted to establish a national and global context for Texas vertebrate history.