Advisory Board

Sonia is Research Group Leader for Industrial Decarbonization Strategies at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS), the German think tank. A political scientist, she has worked at IASS since 2016 and, since 2020, she has also been a non-resident Geoeconomics Fellow at AICGS in Washington D.C. Current projects include CO2 WIN Connect: CO2 as a sustainable carbon source – Pathways to industrial application; CO2nsistent: Making TEA and LCA for CCU Comprehensible for Policymakers; and Techno-Economic and Political Dimensions of a Global Hydrogen Economy. Her research interests include political & social acceptance of decarbonization pathways & technologies, governance of sustainable energy transitions, and international energy and climate policy. She has a PhD from Freie Universität, Berlin.

Emma is Assistant Professor in Social, Economic and Organisational Psychology at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is also Head of Advice Knowledge Centre Psychology and Economic Behaviour, also in Leiden. Her background and expertise lie in public perception, work package leader & researcher in large international interdisciplinary research projects on CCUS (e.g., CATO 2004-2014; ALIGN-CCUS 2017-2021). She is also a founder of the CCUS Social Research Network which examines stakeholder and general public perceptions of CCUS, community engagement, community compensation and communication.

Charles has been chief executive of the Energy and Environmental Research Center at the University of North Dakota since 2019, with more than 14 years at EERC. He leads a multidisciplinary team of some 260 people who focus on research and development of innovative energy and environmental technologies. Previously, he was Program Manager for the Plains CO2 Reduction Partnership and Bakken Production Optimization Program, two major collaborative industry-government programs. His expertise lies in CO2 storage: design, characterisation, monitoring, risk assessment, storage capacity, reservoir engineering, and pilot and commercial scale CCUS operations. He holds a B.S. in Geological Engineering and M.Eng. in Petroleum Engineering.

Filip is Senior Project Manager for CO₂ storage at TNO, the Dutch applied research organisation. Active in CCS since 2006, he leads the TNO team which delivered the geotechnical basis for the first three storage permits under the EU’s CCS Directive. He coordinates the CO₂ transport and storage activities within TNO, including research into flow assurance and storage feasibility assessments. His current interests include: monitoring of CO₂ storage projects, monitoring system design, conformance assessment, and CO₂ transport network evolution and operation. He has a PhD in Geophysics from Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Nicole joined the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) in 2017 where, among other things, she is responsible for the subsidy programmes for deep geothermal projects, both for heat and power generation. Previously, she worked for nearly two decades in the private sector in the energy and environment fields. As a petroleum engineer, she was involved in the planning of oil and gas   development as well as gas and CO₂ storage in several parts of the world. She is now using her subsurface resource management knowledge to support the development of deep geothermal energy in Switzerland.

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Marc has been director of Pole AVENIA, the competitiveness cluster dedicated to underground industries, located in Pau, France, since 2018. There, he chairs the steering committee of the Pycasso project, a cross-border CCUS project (France-Spain) which  brings together some 30 organisations to decarbonise regional industry by using and storing CO2 in Aquitaine. He began his career as a geologist at Elf-Aquitaine in 1979, initially focusing on exploration well operations. Following the merger with Total, he rose to become Total’s Senior Vice President of Exploration, leading a network of more than 2,000 geoscientists in 40 countries. On retirement in 2015, he became editor of the Geologists’ magazine of the Société Géologique de France, until 2020. He is a graduate of the National School of Geology in Nancy

Paulo is co-founder of SeaMag Sustentabilidade, providing consultancy services for the first two BECCS projects in Brazil. He is a member of the steering committee of the International Offshore Geologic CO₂ Storage Workshop. He worked at Petrobras for almost 38 years in the group's Research and Development Center, developing R&D studies, including on oil biotechnology, biological treatment of refinery effluents, climate change mitigation, reduction of atmospheric emissions and CCS. He also coordinated Petrobras' Climate Change Mitigation/Emissions Reduction Technology Programs and participated in the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), the IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Program and attended some Conferences of Parties (UNFCCC), representing the Brazilian government. He holds a PhD in chemical engineering from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He was a visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo (USP) from 2020-23, developing studies on CCS and the production of unconventional natural gas.

Gwendoline Blin is a Solution Consultant for AspenTech SSE reservoir and production modeling software. She has a Specialized Engineering Graduate Degree of Petroleum Engineering and Project  Development from the IFP School in Rueil-Malmaison, in France.

She spent 11 years in Oil and gas industry as Reservoir & Petroleum engineer and Subsidiary Geoscience manager in London and in West Africa. Since almost 2 years, she joined Aspentech to use her background to be a technical support on Reservoir modelization and uncertainty analysis and also on Production Optimization and Multiphase Flow modeling.

Wayne has been Director of Subsurface Technology at Air Products since 2020, leading sequestration development for blue hydrogen. He spent nearly 40 years at Schlumberger starting as a wireline field engineer before progressing to manage field operations in joint BP/Schlumberger large-scale field development. From 2008 to 2015, he was a Senior Project Manager CCS, working on 10 of the most prominent CCS operations worldwide and 30 projects overall. From 2015 to 2020, he was Carbon Services Operations Manager, becoming a recognised CCS expert across North America. He has a B.S in Civil Engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Julia leads a global team of experts developing the latest Blue H2 & CCUS technology for Air Products, supporting the group’s strategic goal to be a market leader in blue hydrogen. This includes developing blue H2 offerings including CO2 processing and transportation​; working to reduce the carbon intensity of hard-to-abate industries such as refining, petrochemical, steel and cement; and collaborating with subsurface teams to develop integrated sequestration solutions​. She is an experienced project & product developer and led product development and management of Air Separation. She has an MEng is Chemical Engineering from the University of Manchester and an MBA from Kingston Business School.

Jean-Luc is Director of Reservoir and Energy Transition R&D at CGG, the geoscience technology services company. He joined the company in 2001 as a reservoir geoscientist where he provided reservoir studies for E&P companies. In 2005, he moved to Rio de Janeiro to build a dedicated reservoir centre for Petrobras working mainly on key 4D projects and pre-salt fields. He has held his current position since 2017, with his team adaprting reservoir methodology to new areas such as carbon capture and storage. He graduated as a geologist from the National School of Geology in Nancy, France, in 1999.