Please join Orphan & Idle Wells Colorado and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Payne Institute Sustainable Finance Lab Program Manager Brad Handler, presenting Carbon Credits, Registries, and Markets: A Comprehensive Guide for the Energy Industry on Wednesday, March 6, 2024, in Denver, CO.  

OVERVIEW:

Join us at the Orphan & Idle Wells Colorado Conference 2024, where we continue to confront the critical environmental, logistical, and financial challenges posed by over 3.7 million abandoned oil and gas wells, including approximately 130,000 orphan wells. These wells, lacking responsible ownership, pose severe risks by leaking oil and toxic chemicals, endangering water sources, contributing to air pollution, and emitting methane, causing environmental hazards and economic burdens on communities and governments.

Under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), significant steps have been taken with a US$4.7bn fund to address the environmental impacts of these wells. In synergy with the DOE’s Undocumented Orphaned Well Program, these efforts aim at ecological restoration, economic growth, and job creation. This event is an extension of our well-received Orphan and Idle Wells series, launched in Texas in October 2023 and successfully started a much-needed dialogue on decarbonizing oil and gas operations in the Lone Star State.

WHY COLORADO?

We chose Colorado because of its position as a leader in oil and gas regulation, industry best practices, and CCUS and geothermal technologies. This pivotal conference will delve into the complexities surrounding orphan wells and 20,000 low-producing wells that are at risk of becoming orphan wells in Colorado. We are excited to feature a speaker faculty of esteemed subject matter experts from state and federal agencies, leading energy companies, academia, and experts in well decommissioning and monitoring.

The event will spotlight initiatives and updates on:

Financial Strategies for Well Abandonment and CCUS
Environmental Compliance and Sustainable Practices
Technological Advancements in Well Plugging and Remediation
Stakeholder Collaboration and Engagement at the federal, state and industry level
Community and Public Health Priorities
CCUS Integration for Carbon-Neutral Assets
Data-Driven Decision-Making
Regulatory Frameworks and Policy Advocacy
Balancing Financial, Environmental, and Community Goals
Innovation and Sustainability in the Energy Industry

The Orphan & Idle Wells Colorado Conference is your opportunity to be at the forefront of this critical environmental and economic challenge. For more information please contact Zia Durrani on zia.durrani@energyconferencenetwork.com.

Please join the Mines Department of Economics and Business, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Commissioner Summer Mersinger, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, for a fireside chat discussing the Role of Futures Markets in Facilitating Mining Investments on Monday, February 12, in Golden, Colorado.  Reception to follow.

Summer K. Mersinger was nominated by President Biden to serve as a Commissioner of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. She was sworn into office on March 30, 2022.

Prior to her appointment, Ms. Mersinger served as the Chief of Staff to CFTC Commissioner Dawn D. Stump. She also served as the Director of the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under former Chairman Heath Tarbert.

Ms. Mersinger has 20 years of Capitol Hill and government relations experience. Prior to joining the CFTC, she was Senior Vice President at Smith-Free Group, a leading government affairs practice, where she worked on financial services issues including advocating for large fintech organizations.

From 2004 to 2016, Ms. Mersinger was a top aide to current Senate Minority Whip John Thune, who represents her home state of South Dakota. Most recently she served as his DC Chief of Staff, coordinating legislative activities for Sen. Thune’s team and working regularly with Senate leadership and senior staff on both sides of the aisle. Ms. Mersinger was instrumental during policy debates involving banking, finance, telecommunications, surface transportation, agriculture, and trade issues. Ms. Mersinger was also directly involved in the communications efforts spearheaded by Sen. Thune through his leadership post on the Senate Republican Conference.

Prior to joining Sen. Thune’s staff, Ms. Mersinger was a director of government relations at Arent Fox, and she also worked in Sen. Thune’s office while he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1999 to 2002. Summer completed her undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota and her law degree from the Catholic University’s Columbus School of law. She is a proud mother of four children, two daughters and two sons, and resides in Northern Virginia with her husband.

Please join the Mines Physics Department Chipps Colloquium as they welcome Dr. Donna Strickland, Professor, Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Nobel Laureate, for a hybrid presentation titled Generating High-Intensity, Ultrashort Optical Pulses on Tuesday, February 13, 2024 in Golden, Colorado.  Reception to follow.

With the invention of lasers, the intensity of a light wave was increased by orders of magnitude over what had been achieved with a light bulb or sunlight. This much higher intensity led to new phenomena being observed, such as violet light coming out when red light went into the material. After Gérard Mourou and I developed chirped pulse amplification, also known as CPA, the intensity again increased by more than a factor of 1,000 and it once again made new types of interactions possible between light and matter. We developed a laser that could deliver short pulses of light that knocked the electrons off their atoms. This new understanding of laser-matter interactions, led to the development of new machining techniques that are used in laser eye surgery or micromachining of glass used in cell phones.

Donna Strickland is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Waterloo and is one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2018 for developing chirped pulse amplification with Gérard Mourou, her PhD supervisor at the time. They published this Nobel-winning research in 1985 when Strickland was a PhD student at the University of Rochester in New York state. Together they paved the way toward the most intense laser pulses ever created. The research has several applications today in industry and medicine — including the cutting of a patient’s cornea in laser eye surgery, and the machining of small glass parts for use in cell phones.

Strickland was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a member of technical staff at Princeton University. In 1997, she joined the University of Waterloo, where her ultrafast laser group develops high-intensity laser systems for nonlinear optics investigations. She is a recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, a Premier’s Research Excellence Award and a Cottrell Scholar Award. She served as the president of the Optical Society (OSA) in 2013 and is a fellow of OSA, the Royal Society of Canada, and SPIE (International Society for Optics and Photonics). Strickland is an honorary fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering as well as the Institute of Physics. She received the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement and holds numerous honorary doctorates.

Strickland earned a PhD in optics from the University of Rochester and a B.Eng. from McMaster University.

Hosting partners

Please join WISEM at the Colorado School of Mines as they welcome Payne Institute Faculty Fellow Dr. Jessica Smith presenting Finding a Place at Mines on Wednesday, February 7, 2024 at the Green Center at Mines.

Wednesdays with WISEM is a professional development event for members of the Mines community showcasing an outstanding Mines woman who is making great contributions to their field. Join us on February 7th to hear from Dr. Jessica Smith, Professor in the Department of Engineering, Design, and Society. She will share her experiences finding a place at Mines as a social scientist and helping to open up spaces to celebrate the funds of knowledge of first generation engineering students.

Please join the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Research Associate Namrata Chatterjee presenting a virtual seminar titled VIIRS Nightlights Detection of Anchorages and Fishing Grounds Around the World at the Fall 2023 AGU Conference online on Thursday, January 25, 2024.

Since the 1970s, it has been established that fishing boats with strong lighting can be detected using nighttime visible low-light imaging data gathered by polar-orbiting meteorological sensors (Croft, 1979). Two such sensors equipped with low-light imaging capabilities are the U.S. Air Force Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Operational Linescan System (OLS), with data archived since 1992, and the NASA/NOAA Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), flown since 2011, and having data repository with the Earth Observation Group (EOG) at the Colorado School of Mines.

In 2015, EOG developed the VIIRS boat detection (VBD) algorithm with support from NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) proving ground program and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Currently, the VBD data are generated in near real-time, and records are available from April 2012 onwards for Asia, and from 2017 onwards for the world. Besides the nightly product, the EOG has created monthly and annual summary grids, unveiling spatial patterns not easily discernible from single-night data. This article presents cumulative VBD images spanning anchorages and fishing grounds from the years 2012 to 2021.

Please join the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Fellow Dustin Mulvaney and Payne Research Associate Mikhail Zhizhin presenting at the Fall 2023 AGU Conference in San Francisco, CA.  

Session – Thursday, December 14 – 9:30 – 13:50 PT
A41J-2764 Measuring activity of exothermal industrial sites based on spatio-temporal clustering of nighttime infrared satellite detections
By Mikhail Zhizhin, Christopher Elvidge, and Tamara Sparks
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm23/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1350534

Session – Thursday, December 14 – 15:53 – 16:03 PT
A43A-05 Preliminary results from a spectral index designed to monitor lighting conversions from high-intensity discharge lamps to LED
By Christopher Elvidge, Mikhail Zhizhin, Vince Palombi, Ashley Pipkin, Sharolyn Anderson, and David Keith 
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm23/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1437278

Session – Friday, December 15 – 15:30 – 15:40 PT
GC53D-03 Maximizing the Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reductions from Electricity Resource Portfolios
By Brian Tarroji, Dustin Mulvaney, Rebecca Peer, and Emily Grubert
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm23/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/1294352

Please join Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines as we welcome Dr. Morgan Bazilian presenting Energy and Mineral Security and Geopolitics at Benchmark Week 2023 on Wednesday, November 15, 2023 in Los Angeles, CA.  

Since 2016, Benchmark Week has been the leading gathering for the world’s lithium-ion battery supply chain and the wider energy transition.

This year, multiple content streams held simultaneously over three days will provide broader context of the opportunities and challenges facing clean energy supply chains, with in depth expert presentations & discussions alongside unrivalled networking, all hosted by Benchmark Mineral Intelligence.