Engineering Aspects of Geologic CO2 Storage

Dr. Dayanand Saini is currently an Assistant Professor of Petroleum Engineering at California State University, Bakersfield (CSUB), where, apart from teaching various core engineering and petroleum engineering electives and developing the petroleum engineering program, as a co-principal investigator for a four-year-long Notational Science Foundation (NSF) funded multimillion dollar research project, he is investigating the feasibility of using CO2 injection as a drive mechanism to produce water formation for beneficial reuses.

Prior to joining CSUB, Dr. Saini worked as Research Manager-Reservoir Engineering at the Energy and Environmental Research Center (EERC) of the University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, where he supervised and managed compositional reservoir simulation, special core analysis (SCAL), and other reservoir engineering related activities for two multimillion-dollar projects. Simultaneously, he worked on CO2 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and storage demonstration projects funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE)-National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL). He also conducted CO2 EOR potential evaluation studies of candidate (depleted) oil fields as per client's needs, and worked as Reservoir Engineer with Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited, India, from 2001 to 2006.

Dr. Saini has authored and co-authored several journal articles in the area of geologic CO2 storage (GCS) and has assisted industry clients in making essential business decisions when acquiring depleted oil fields. In November 2015, in recognition of the significant research conducted in the last five years, he was nominated for the ?200,000 "Protection of the Environment" Award by the ENI, an Italian multinational oil and gas company headquartered in Rome, in 2016.