Meet a Geoscientist: Katherine Romanak

Since 2007, Dr. Katherine Romanak has been a lead geochemist who has developed environmental monitoring plans for over 6 actively injecting, large-scale CO2 storage projects. Katherine is an academic that works alongside industry to develop, innovate, and apply CO2 storage technology in real-world applications. Katherine pioneered a process-based soil gas monitoring approach, which avoids costly and complex baseline data collection and initiated the paradigm shift of near-surface monitoring. Katherine’s CO2 monitoring method has become a standard approach to environmental monitoring worldwide. She has championed the concept of leakage “attribution” as a critical part of monitoring in the near surface.

Katherine was an independent technical lead assessing the first-ever claim of CO2 leakage by a landowner living on the Kerr Farm near a CO2 injection site. Using attribution techniques, Katherine and her team determined that no leakage had occurred at the Kerr Farm, and the experience outlines the importance of having protocols for responding to stakeholder concerns in place before a project begins.

Katherine is often the scientist-in-the-room providing technical information into global regulations at the UNFCCC COPs and in the USA (Class VI and California Low Carbon Fuel Standard CCS protocol), which has led to an improvement of responsibly injecting CO2 and their regulations that protect both the environment and carbon storage projects. Katherine serves on many international advisory panels, and technical boards, and continues to effectively convey monitoring and environmental safety for geological CO2 storage to wide stakeholder audiences. Katherine provides professional training for subsurface oil and gas professionals who want to repurpose their skills for CCS. Katherine is the co-instructor who helped develop the new online CCS certification program at The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Resources:

Gulf Coast Carbon Center: https://gccc.beg.utexas.edu/

Network of National CCUS Centers of Excellence: https://gccc.beg.utexas.edu/nncce/

Dr. Romanak on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-romanak-03649728/