Christopher Otto

ERE Energy, Resources and the Environment

The 2015 Outstanding Student Poster (OSP) Award is awarded to Christopher Otto for the poster/PICO entitled:

Do we have to consider temperature-dependent material properties in large-scale environmental impact assessments of UCG? (Otto, C; Kempka, T)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

I am a PhD student in the Hydrogeology section of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and at the University of Potsdam (Germany) under supervision of Prof. Michael Kühn and Dr.-Ing. Thomas Kempka.

At the EGU GA 2015 poster session of the Energy, Resources and the Environment division (ERE), I presented the results of thermo-mechanical simulations on porosity and permeability development in close vicinity to underground coal gasification (UCG) reactors. Our simulation results demonstrate that thermo-mechanical temperature-dependent parameters have a negligible effect on permeability changes only. Hence, large-scale assessments of UCG environmental impacts using complex 3D regional-scale models become computationally feasible by reducing the model input parameter dimension, i.e., by using temperature-independent parameters. The undertaken numerical modeling study contributes to the assessment and mitigation of environmental impacts by improving the understanding of coupled thermo-mechanical processes in geological underground utilization.