
Simon Gant is a Technical Fellow in the Fluid Dynamics Team at the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) Science and Research Centre. His main areas of interest are in dispersion modelling and consequence assessment. Simon is chair of Atmospheric Dispersion Modelling Liaison Committee (www.admlc.com), which comprises around a dozen experts drawn from Government departments (e.g., the Environment Agency, Met Office, UKHSA) plus the energy company EDF and consultancy RiskAware. He has been involved in various CCS-related projects over the last 18 years at HSE, including CO2PipeHaz and COOLTRANS. In 2017, he led a review of HSE’s work on CCS, which is documented in a report available here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/research/rrhtm/rr1121.htm.

Zoe Chaplin is a Principal Risk Scientist at the Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) Science and Research Centre. She has a particular interest in major accident hazard (MAH) pipelines and is responsible for the on-going development of HSE’s MAH pipelines risk assessment modelling tool. She is also a member of an Institution of Gas Engineers and Managers (IGEM) standards panel on natural gas pipeline risk assessment.
Zoe is actively involved in projects relating to the conversion of the natural gas network in the UK to hydrogen and the associated carbon capture and storage. This includes industry-led projects and those from other government departments, as well as the updating of HSE’s risk assessment models to make them suitable for both hydrogen and carbon dioxide.

David is a Founder and Director of Progressive Energy. He has a long and successful track record of Technology and Business Development at Senior level, with over 30 years’ experience in the electricity and energy sector, including 15 years in the area of CCS and more recently energy storage. This includes development and commercialisation of new and emerging technologies, project management, project and business financing, plant operational support, international marketing, commercial management and negotiation and business strategy.

Professor Sara Walker is Director of The Centre for Energy at Newcastle University. She has been working in the energy sector since 1996, with a career spanning industry and academia. Her research focus is on renewable energy and energy efficiency in buildings, energy policy, energy resilience, and whole energy systems. She is Director of the EPSRC Hub on Hydrogen Integration for Accelerated Energy Transitions, EPSRC Energy Demand Research Champion, and Deputy Director for the EPSRC Supergen Energy Networks Hub. She is an Advisory Committee Member for the UK Energy Research Centre and the UK CCS Research Centre, and also contributes to the EPSRC Scientific Advisory Committee for Energy.

Mike Wailes (Strategy Manager, Europe) has worked for Phillips 66 for 23 years, including roles in refining, business development, corporate strategy and commercial within the UK, US and Germany. Mike manages Phillips 66 joint venture in the MiRO refinery in Karlsruhe, Germany and is responsible for European Strategy including work on industrial decarbonisation and low carbon liquid fuels.

Adrian Topham is Senior Development Manager CCUS, at The Crown Estate.
Adrian’s role as sector lead is to help create a pipeline of geological CO2 storage prospects that delivers CB6 targets and meets market expectations, while playing a lead spatial planning role to optimise seabed use between CCUS, wind and other sectors.His previous experience as an engineer, team leader, general manager and now development manager stems from academic training in chemical and petroleum engineering. He has worked as a reservoir engineer, aiding hydrocarbon extraction in many countries and is now committed to the carbon cycle and returning the by-products after use to the subsurface.Adrian’s CCUS sector interests are both technical (geophysical, geomechanical, geological) and economic (capture feasibility, transportation, removals). He is currently involved in supporting research into windfarm / seismic monitoring interaction.

Fatemeh has more than 17 years of experience in Energy industry. Currently she is the Director of Hydrogen and CCS Business Development at Air Products where she works with a range of global customers across the energy value chain on topics related to the Energy Transition. Prior to this role, she was the Venture Owner of Carbon Capture Technologies at Siemens Energy Incubator where she developed technology development and go-to-market strategies to build the CCS business for which she successfully pitched the business to potential investors to raise sufficient fund to take the venture to the next level up to the “Exit/Launch” phase.Fatemeh’s background is Mechanical Engineering, she has Masters in Renewable Energy from Heriot-Watt university and PhD in Carbon Capture Technologies from the University of Leeds in collaboration with the University of Texas at Austin.

Prof. Ian Reaney leads the Functional Materials & Devices Group in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering (MSE). IMR is a Fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society and the IOM3 and Dyson Chair in Ceramics. He has published >400 papers, has a H-index = 69, with > 18,000 citations. He has won numerous awards including the Verulam Medal (2017) and was recently elected to the World Academy of Ceramics. He is an Adjunct Professor at Pennsylvania State University (PSU) and University of Aveiro, Portugal and European site director of the Centre for Dielectrics and Piezoelectrics in partnership with PSU and North Carolina State University. He is the PI on the newly awarded £2m, Transforming the Foundation Indutries Network+ grant

Professor Mercedes Maroto-Valer (FRSE, FIChemE, FRSC, FRSA, FEI) is Champion and Director of the UK Industrial Decarbonisation Research and Innovation Centre (IDRIC) focused on accelerating the transition to net zero of the UK industrial clusters and establishing the first world net-zero industrial cluster. Mercedes is Deputy Principal (Global Sustainability) and Director of the Research Centre for Carbon Solutions (RCCS) at Heriot-Watt University. Her internationally recognised track record covers energy systems, CCUS, integration of hydrogen technologies and low-carbon fuels. She has over 550 publications, holds leading positions in professional societies and editorial boards and has received numerous international prizes and awards.

Haroun Mahgerefteh FIChemE, is senior Professor of Chemical Engineering at UCL. His work in CCUS (total funding over €20 m) includes coordinating the three EC FP7 and H2020 projects, CO2PipeHaz, CO2QUEST and C4U involving collaboration between academic and industry partners across Europe, China, Canada and USA.
Haroun is also key partner in the Horizon Europe Projects, CaLby2020 (Decarbonising industrial processes with Calcium Looping) and ENCASE (A European Network of Research Infrastructures for CO2 Transport and Injection).
Haroun is an elected committee member, leading the Transport Infrastructure Task Group of the Carbon Utilization Infrastructure and Infrastructure Markets study report mandated by the U.S Congress. The two part report administered by the U.S. National Academies of Sciences is intended to inform U.S. Department of Energy and private sector $multi-billion investments in research, demonstration and deployment for Carbon Utilization Infrastructure.
Haroun is one of the two lead authors of the European Zero Emission Platform (ZEP) report titled ‘A Trans-European CO2 Transportation Infrastructure for CCUS: Opportunities & Challenges’. The report, aims to facilitate the development of an extensive pipeline and ship infrastructure for transporting several Mt/yr of CO2 captured from major regional industrial emitters for permanent offshore geological storage, considered as a key enabler for meeting Net Zero emission target by 2030.