After finishing my undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Waterloo, my plan was to work as a transportation engineering consultant. But that all changed in my last semester when I decided to take a course on groundwater contamination, which led me to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Waterloo. My master’s thesis was on parameter estimation for a semi-analytical solution to a groundwater contamination problem. After I got my master’s degree, I began working as an environmental engineering consultant based out of Kitchener, Ontario, and then Reston, Virginia. My main projects were on groundwater flow modeling to understand groundwater quantity and quality problems across North America. While I enjoyed my work, I wanted to take a deeper dive into model development and so I decided to pursue a PhD.

For my PhD, I knew I wanted to do something related to climate change and energy, but I also wanted the project to build on my experience in subsurface flow modeling. That’s what led me to do my PhD at Princeton University with Prof. Michael Celia, who was known for modeling studies on geologic storage of carbon dioxide. My first project was on developing an analytical solution for leakage of carbon dioxide and brine from storage formations through geologic faults, which was to be integrated into a combined numerical and analytical model capturing leakage through faults and abandoned wells.

In the third year of my PhD, I was awarded the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy fellowship to study methane emissions from oil and gas development, which was just beginning to be a hot topic. At the time, oil and gas production was rapidly increasing across North America with the widespread deployment of hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, and many were concerned about the increase in methane emissions from this new development. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming potential of 86 times that of carbon dioxide over a 20-year timeframe and a key target for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, especially in the short term. But methane emissions from oil and gas is a big field, and I knew I had to find my niche. Therefore, I began to look at subsurface features that I already knew – geologic faults and abandoned wells. First, my goal was to estimate methane emissions from these sources using modeling, beginning with abandoned wells. However, I quickly learned there was no data to constrain my models. And so, I reached out to other students and researchers across Princeton and put together a team to do field measurements, which became the first measurements of methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells.

Millions of oil and gas wells exist across Canada, the United States and abroad as legacies of the 160-year history of oil and gas production. Many of these wells are no longer in production and have been abandoned with technologies and practices of the time. In addition to emitting methane, these wells are likely contributing to broad environmental impacts to groundwater, soils, and ecosystems. As a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, I conducted geospatial and statistical analysis to investigate the role of different factors such as well depth and type on methane emission rates and groundwater contamination risk posed by oil and gas development. There are dozens of factors that may explain why certain wells emit more methane and are more likely to contaminate groundwater. Identifying these factors and analyzing the large datasets of well attributes and measurement data for the millions of wells in the U.S., Canada, and abroad is a key component of my research program at McGill, bringing me to GERAD.