Latest Events

Speaker: Seabron Adamson (Boston College / Charles River Associates)

EPRG invites you to our Energy & Environment Seminar held in-person. A sandwich lunch will be provided beforehand, from 12:00 to 12:30.

Seabron Adamson is Vice President, Energy at international economics consultancy Charles River Associates and a visiting research fellow at the Judge Business School at Cambridge. He has worked on power market design issues in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union and other countries. He is the co-author of Renewable Energy Finance: Theory and Practice (Academic Press, 2024). He was previously an energy analyst and trader at a major global hedge fund.

Further information about this term’s seminars can be found here.

Speaker: Herminio Tasinafo Honorio, Delft University of Technology

Underground man-made salt caverns are a proven technology for energy storage, and their usage is expected to increase in the coming years, following the current efforts towards energy transition. Upscaling salt caverns (e.g., systems of caverns) also raises concerns about safety and cavern integrity, which requires a careful lifetime assessment of their mechanical stability. In this context, this presentation examines the mechanical behavior and failure mechanisms of salt rocks, as well as methods for identifying situations that could compromise cavern integrity. The importance of a multiscale approach, spanning from laboratory experiments to field-scale simulations, is also discussed. Without diving into the mathematical details, a physical intuition is provided on how to compose a constitutive model to capture the different deformation mechanisms in salt rocks. Finally, the impact of different constitutive model choices and calibrations is analyzed in the light of numerical simulations.

This talk is part of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Flows (IEEF) series.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Catherine Pearson.

Speaker: Dr Conor Hickey, Assistant Professor in Climate, Environmental & Urban Policy, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge

Reaching net zero requires major reductions in fossil fuel use, along with removing emissions from any remaining consumption. This talk will outline Conor’s research on how these reductions affect the economies of scale and scope of fossil fuel infrastructure, and the resulting impacts on firms and energy markets as we move toward climate targets. It will also highlight findings from his recent publication in Joule, which explores how firms can use portfolios of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects to offset fossil fuel emissions. The study finds that portfolio approaches enable forest and biochar projects to help stabilise global temperatures over centuries. However, to ensure long-term climate stability, these portfolios must transition fully to geological storage by the time net zero is reached.

There is no need to register if you plan to attend the seminar in person. However, if you would like to join the seminar online via Zoom, please register via the link. Upon registering your interest in this form, you will receive an e-mail with the Zoom meeting link ON THE DAY OF THE SEMINAR. Entering your name and organisational affiliation is optional. Your details will only be used to send you the Zoom meeting link and will not be shared with any external parties.

Cambridge Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance (CEENRG) series

Speaker: Joe Saffer, Senior Product Analyst, Aurora Energy 

Speaker: Tony Roulstone, University of Cambridge Lecturer Nuclear Engineering

In this talk, we identify the barriers to nuclear competitiveness, before examining the ways of making existing designs, the more recent SMRs and advanced technologies succeed. In each case, we look at the facts, the opportunities and the prospects for delivering the nuclear promise inherent in the resurgence of interest in nuclear energy.

Tony Roulstone has broad experience of Aerospace, Power, Defence and Systems sectors in a diverse environment. He lectures in Nuclear Energy at University of Cambridge and is a founder of the Department of Engineering’s Nuclear Energy MPhil programme.

He’s led successful business transformation across whole of a major multinational company delivering major cost reduction & cash savings and developed diverse group of high technology businesses strategically repositioning businesses & growing both the group’s market share & its profit.

This talk is in-person and not delivered remotely.

This talk is part of the Engineering Department Nuclear Energy Seminars series.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Helene Jones.