Dr. Niels Lindeloff has attended CERE Discussion meetings previously. However, he represents Total for the first time here after Total’s recent acquisition of Maersk Oil.
“Total has been a member of CERE for many years. We find the combination of CERE’s strong background in thermodynamics and the inclusion of competencies from other disciplines fruitful.
For instance, it is not possible to fully develop Enhanced Oil Recovery without an understanding of the geoscience involved. Also, we try to understand the filling history of the reservoir and how this and various subsequent physical and chemical processes affect the fluid property variations within the reservoir. This understanding is required in order to predict the processes you will encounter once you start producing.”
Niels Lindeloff encourages CERE to maintain the current balance between chemical engineering and geoscience disciplines:
“The strong history and competence within applied thermodynamics is the main selling point of CERE. One always needs to be careful not to dilute ones’ core competence. We find the interdisciplinary approach extremely useful, and still see the role of the other disciplines to be leveraging application of thermodynamics to solve relevant challenges.”
In 2018, the CERE Discussion meeting was for the first time taking place jointly with the annual meeting of the KT-Consortium, specializing in process simulation.
“This is quite natural. The thermodynamic focus of CERE and the process simulations of the KT-Consortium seem to offer obvious opportunities for synergy,” Dr. Lindeloff comments. “I am tasked with following the upstream applications and as our company also has vast interests in downstream applications where process simulation is extremely relevant, the downstream division of Total was already engaged in the KT-Consortium and is represented by a colleague today.”