Ian leads the Earth Systems and Environment group at the Bureau. For the last 4 years, Ian has been working on policy, as well as legal and technical aspects of carbon management in the context of CO2 enhanced oil recovery and sequestration in brine reservoirs. Ian was the geologic sequestration lead for the FutureGen Texas Team and was responsible for putting together the Environmental Information Volume (EIV) that formed the basis for ES for the two Texas FutureGen sites. Ian has given numerous talks at national conferences on gasification technologies and CO2 sequestration, as well as sequestration as a part of EOR.
Ian's current research interests are in science-based regulatory frameworks for CO2 sequestration, geomechanical and fluid-flow modeling of faults and seals in engineered brine reservoirs, and risk assessment for CO2. Ian is the co-PI of a $38-million DOE-funded project to study 1 million tons/year CO2 injection into the water leg of an EOR project at Cranfield field, Mississippi.
Ian came to the Bureau after working for 10 years as a Scientist Manager at the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals, and Energy—Division of Mineral Resources. As a geology professor, Ian taught at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
Research Interests
Environmental geology
Remote sensing (geologic applications of multispectral, radar, and lidar data sets)
Carbon sequestration
Geoinformatics
Education
B.A. (First Class Honors), Earth Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, 1974
Ph.D. Geological Sciences, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, 1982
Selected Publications
Nicot, J. -P., and Duncan, I. J., 2008, Science-based permitting of geological sequestration of CO2 in brine reservoirs in the U.S.: Environmental Science & Policy, v. 11, p. 14-24.
Ambrose, W. A., Lakshminarasimhan, Srivatsan, Nunez Lopez, Vanessa, Hovorka, S. D., and Duncan, I. J., 2007, Geologic factors controlling CO2 storage capacity and permanence: case studies based on experience with heterogeneity in oil and gas reservoirs applied to CO2 storage: Environmental Geology: Springer-Verlag, DOI 10.1007/x00254-007-0940-2, 16 p.
Duncan, I. J., 2006, Addressing public policy issues facing long term CO2 storage in Texas (abs.), in Fifth Annual Conference on Carbon Capture & Sequestration: Taking steps toward deployment utilizing the accumulated knowledge base, May 8-11, Alexandria, Virginia, unpaginated.
Duncan, I. J., 2006, Numerical modeling of role of faults in understanding long-term CO2 storage: the upscaling dilemma (abs.), in Fifth Annual Conference on Carbon Capture & Sequestration: Taking steps toward deployment utilizing the accumulated knowledge base, May 8-11, Alexandria, Virginia, unpaginated.
