News 2026

2026: A Quick Review

August 17–20, 2026: Please be sure to catch the Gulf Coast Carbon Center’s representatives Dolores van der Kolk and Carlos Uroza at the SEG-AAPG-SEPM IMAGE Conference. We look forward to catching up and/or discussing GCCC Sponsorship with you!

Tuesday, August 18

10:20 am to Noon - GEFE Poster Session 1, 3rd level: Creating Hands-On Education Experiences for Future Generations – Dolores van der Kolk is co-chairing this session and will present, “Making CCS technology and research accessible for public engagement and formal education” by D. van der Kolk, S. Hovorka, A. Luciano, K. Romanak

10:20 am to Noon - INT Poster Session 3: Sedimentology & Geomorphology, Poster Location 4, 3rd level – Pete Flaig will present, “Depositional systems and biostratigraphy of Wilcox Group deposits along the shoreline of the Toledo Bend Reservoir, East Texas” by P. P. Flaig, C. Piela, J. M. Bloxson, D. van der Kolk, V. Smith

2:10 pm - SILIC Oral Session 1: Advances in Onshore and Nearshore Depositional Systems Analysis and Reservoir Evaluation, Room 360A – Carlos Uroza will present, “Revisiting the Frio depositional system onshore Texas, USA: Understanding its depositional facies distribution and rock quality variability for reservoir characterization purposes” by C. A. Uroza, W. A. Ambrose, S. Bhattacharya

1:20 to 3:00 pm - GEFE Special Session (SS) 8: Challenges and Solutions: The Current State of Geoscience Education, Industry Needs and Society Impacts, Room 372B – D. van der Kolk is a session chair & panel moderator 

3:40 to 5:20 pm - GEFE Oral Session 1: Geoscience Education Across the 20th and 21st centuries: A View from the Trenches, Rm. 372 B – D. van der Kolk will be in this to support as GEFE technical chair

3:40 to 5:00 pm - At the Carbon Management Pavilion, Main Exhibition Hall – C. Uroza is the panel moderator at 4:20 pm for, “The Story of the Core: Ground Truth for Carbon Storage Systems”

Wednesday, August 19

1:20 to 3:00 pm - GEFE Oral Session 2, Creating Digital Outcrop Models for Industry and Beyond, Room 372B, D. van der Kolk is a session chair

1:45 pm – Rm 372B, D. van der Kolk will present “A new window to the world: A drone photogrammetry preview of the best outcrop analogue for deltaic reservoirs, North Slope of Alaska by D. van der Kolk and P. Flaig.

3:40 to 5:20 pm – GEFE oral session 3, Virtual Geology Field Trips & Training, Session chairs D. van der Kolk and P. Flaig

Thursday, August 20

3:10-4:50 pm - LCS Oral Session 5, Storage Case Studies (Low Carbon Solutions), Room 371A, C. Uroza is a session chair

August 5, 2026: Congratulations to Hailun Ni! Her UT Austin Hornraiser raised $2,725 for STEM outreach materials! We are delighted that she raised $725 over her initial goal! We look forward to seeing her “rugged sand tank kit” deployed at a Texas school near you, soon.  

July 31, 2026: For the GeoFORCE Texas program, the GCCC wraps up having 24 high school seniors who participated in hands-on, carbon storage experiments led by Hailun Ni and Katherine Romanak.

Hailun Ni set up three groups of students to design and create three mini sand tank lab experiments to help model how CO₂ flows in the subsurface.

Katherine Romanak set up three groups of students to design and test hypotheses related to CO₂ being injected into siliceous and carbonate reservoirs.

Special thanks to Sue Hovorka, Angela Luciano, and Dolores van der Kolk for supporting these researchers and students this week. Students will compete to win the award of presenting their experiment in a poster-format at AGU later this year! Let’s go, CCS GeoFORCE teams!

July 30, 2026: The Bureau of Economic Geology featured Alex Bump and the GCCC’s research on Composite Confining Systems in their web news series. To read more, check out how Research Associate Professor Alex Bump and colleagues at the GCCC conduct research by injecting “digital CO₂ to see how the geologic uncertainty might impact containment” here.

July 29, 2026: UT Austin’s Gulf Coast Carbon Center and IEAGHG released the final technical report for the 8th International Workshop on Offshore Geologic CO₂ storage. Special thanks to Equinor for hosting our event on April 20–21, 2026. There were approximately 100 in-person attendees, with over 250 participants attending online over the two-day event.

The GCCC and IEAGHG established this workshop 10 years ago to help facilitate sharing knowledge about storing CO₂ offshore, internationally. In 2016, UT Austin hosted the first offshore CO₂ workshop. Through the years, the workshop has been previously hosted in Beaumont, Texas (2017), Oslo, Norway (2018), Bergen, Norway (2020), New Orleans, Louisiana (2022), Aberdeen, UK (2023) and Porth Arthur, Texas (2025). The workshop has grown by showcasing 38 international CO₂ storage projects from countries like Norway, the Netherlands, and England.

Storage potential in offshore sedimentary basins is plentiful and has distinct benefits and limitations compared to utilizing storage onshore. This year’s workshop was held in Bergen to allow participants to visit the operational Northern Lights facility.

The agenda included 43 presentations and dedicated discussion sessions, covering international project updates, basin-scale management, prospect development, injection, monitoring technologies, the evolution of monitoring programs, and commercial, regulatory and social dimensions. The meeting concluded with key conclusions and recommendations. Copies of the presentations for this workshop and previous workshops can be found here. Special thanks to both Katherine Romanak and Alex Bump for attending and presenting at this workshop.

July 23, 2026: Sue Hovorka and Dolores van der Kolk met with a representative from the American Petroleum Institute (API) to discuss how the Gulf Coast Carbon Center can technically support API committees, bulletins, and standards with respect to carbon storage research.

July 20–23, 2026: Angela Luciano attended the National Association of Geoscience Teachers’ (NAGTs’) Earth Educators’ Rendezvous in Columbia, South Carolina to present a poster about CCS education and to participate in Share-a-thon activities. Angela was joined by Kristyn Stovall, from Tatum High School, who is one of our Carbon-not Ambassadors. Thanks to Angela and Kristyn for presenting several TXLA CMC outreach materials to geoscience teachers attending this amazing conference.

On Tuesday, July 21, Angela presented the poster entitled, “Carbon Capture and Storage Education in the Gulf Coast: Integration to High School through a Groundwater Monitoring Lab” by K. Romanak, S. Hovorka, A. Luciano, and D. van der Kolk

July 10, 2026: Congratulations to Seyyed Abolfazl Hosseini, Jungang Chen and their co-authors for their manuscript entitled, "A decade of progress in the modeling and simulation of geologic carbon storage."

This manuscript was published for the September 2026 Special Issue from the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control, known as "20 Years since the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Capture and Storage." Congratulations, team!

July 9, 2026: Congratulations to the GCCC’s Alex Bump and PGE’s Nicolas Espinoza for their paper, “Are the Fears Justified? Observations of Gulf Coast Fault Seal and Implications for CCS,” which was awarded “Best Oral Presentation” from the CCUS 2026 Conference this year! Their presentation was selected for this award by the CCUS 2026 Judging and Awards Committee, based on attendee judging scores.

Congratulations to GCCC’s Carlos Uroza and Shuvajit Bhattacharya for their paper, “Variabilities in Rock Quality in the Frio Formation, Onshore Texas, USA: Implications for CO2 Storage and Reservoir Injectivity,” which was awarded as 2026 CCUS’s Best “Regional Characterization” Oral Presentation. “This achievement not only reflects [their] passion and commitment but also sets a great example for others in the field.”

July 7, 2026: Hailun Ni kicked off a HornRaiser campaign at The University of Texas at Austin to raise $2,000 to build a portable mini sand tank kit — to bring hands-on carbon storage science experiments out of the Sandtank lab and into classrooms across Texas!

Here's the challenge: Geologic carbon storage is one of our best tools for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, but it all happens a half-mile underground, completely out of sight. What's invisible is hard to understand and hard to get excited about. At the Gulf Coast Carbon Center at UT Austin, we make these underground storage environments visible by recreating real subsurface geology inside transparent tanks, so everyone may watch CO₂ rise, spread, and get trapped between sand grains, exactly like it does underground.

Every time students see our sand tank models, something clicks! This kit will let us bring that "aha" moment to K-12 classrooms, science festivals, and community events all over the state. Every gift, large or small, puts real science into real hands and inspires the next generation of scientists and engineers.

July 1, 2026: Check out a new International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control publication by Sue Hovorka, Marcia Couëslan, and Charles Jenkins entitled, "Evolution of storage monitoring – update in response to commercial and regulatory drivers." Congratulations, Team!

July 1, 2026: Congratulations to Jungang Chen and Seyyed Hosseini for publishing, "Optimizing CO₂ storage management considering safety constraints in multi-stakeholder multi-site GCS projects: A Markov game perspective" in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control.

June 28 –July 4, 2026: The GCCC’s Katherine Romanak was an instructor discussed CCS monitoring and environmental impact at IEAGHG’s CCS Summer School held in Copenhagen, Denmark.

The GCCC congratulates our master’s student, Nargiz Akmurzayeva, who was selected and attended this internationally prestigious program this year! Congratulations, Nargiz!

Special thanks to Katherine Romanak for volunteering to support this incredible program to help spread the word about CCS.

June 5, 2026: Special thanks to 1PointFive for hosting, and sponsoring the catering, for the GCCC’s Sponsors’ Meeting at the Ion District in Houston, TX. Approximately 30 participants attended the GCCC’s (hybrid) strategy meeting. Researchers Alex Bump, Vanessa Nunez-Lopez, Hailun Ni, Katherine Romanak, and Tip Meckel summarized GCCC research activities conducted over the last four years. For this occasion, Angela Luciano worked with the GCCC Team to compile a version of the GCCC’s 2022–2026 Retrospective Report for distribution.

In the late morning and early afternoon, Sue Hovorka led the audience into breakout sessions to brainstorm about key topics that helps set the GCCC team with the best line of research topics over the next 4 years. Input every four years allows the GCCC to better support our sponsors as well as the CCS industry's future success.

This strategy meeting is quite different in format from our typical technical meetings. This particular meeting initiates discussions for a document that the GCCC team will provide in 2027, known as our "Four-Year Big Plan," which serves as a compass guiding our future course of action. Special thanks to the GCCC’s Dolores van der Kolk and 1PointFive’s Victor Parra Galvis, Ashley Neal, and Colleen Williams who held a beautifully seamless meeting!

June 2, 2026: The National Ocean Industries Association and the Offshore Operators Committee hosted a meeting called the "Offshore CCS & New Frontiers" at the Rice University Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies. Thanks to the GCCC’s Alex Bump for presenting, "The State of Gulf Coast Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS)."

The agenda included topics, such as: Multi-use OCS management: oil & gas, wind, critical minerals, carbon sequestration, aquaculture, nuclear, etc.; ocean minerals and the path to commercialization; AI applications for offshore operations; BSEE and BOEM regulatory updates; and CCS.

Thanks to Ben Hilton for the photographs below!

May 30, 2026: The GCCC welcomes Uzoma Ajugwe who is entering a second year in the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Ph.D. program at The University of Texas at Austin. Uzoma holds a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from the Federal University of Technology, Owerri in Nigeria, and a master's degree in environmental engineering from the University of South Florida. Under the supervision of Drs. Hailun Ni and David DiCarlo, Uzoma's current research focuses on using sand tank experiments and numerical modeling to understand fracture behaviors within Enhanced Geothermal Systems.

May 18, 2026: The GCCC Team celebrated Ramón H. Treviño who retires at the end of May! Thank you, Ramón, for 29.5 years of service at the Bureau of Economic Geology!

May 15, 2026: Exciting news! Katherine Romanak was selected as a Lead Author for the upcoming 2027 IPCC Methodology Report on Carbon Dioxide Removal Technologies, Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

Katherine will contribute to the topic of CO₂ Transport, Injection, and Geological Storage, bringing decades of experience in CCS monitoring, environmental assurance, and geological storage science to this important international effort.

The report will provide additional guidance for national greenhouse gas inventories and support the evolving global framework for carbon management and accounting.

Katherine looks forward to contributing alongside colleagues from around the world to advance rigorous, science-based approaches to CDR and CCUS! Congratulations, Katherine!

May 8, 2026: Congratulations to all students graduating this season! We are particularly proud of our students from the Gulf Coast Carbon Center who graduated today! GCCC students pictured here include: Edwina Owusu - Adjapong, Eddie Talen, Bimar Maulana, Javid Ali, and Ssu-Chi Yang! Hook'em, Horns!

Special thanks to advisors: Alex Bump, Tip Meckel, Sue Hovorka, Carlos A Uroza, and Ramon Gil-Egui. Way to go to the GCCC Team!

May 1, 2026: Ramón Treviño was featured in the Bureau of Economic Geology’s "Meet a Geoscientist" series, click here to watch.

April 30, 2026: The GCCC celebrated our master’s student, Edwina Owusu-Adjapong, by hosting a baby shower. Edwina delivered a healthy baby in May. Both Mom and Baby are doing wonderfully. Congratulations to Edwina and family, and welcome to the world, future Longhorn!

April 27, 2026: Congratulations to PhD student, Melianna Ulfah! Melianna was awarded with the John Emery Adams Scholarship by the West Texas Geological Foundation. Congratulations, Melianna!

April 22, 2026: In celebration of Earth Day, Research Scientist Associate Angela Luciano, undergraduate Cecil Armstrong, and graduate student Farzana Rahman joined dozens of students, organizations, and community members for UT Austin's "Hooked on Earth Day Fair." Participants came together to explore practical approaches to sustainability on campus, including the GCCC’s research on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology and how CCS plays a role in reducing emissions.

This event highlighted a range of student-led initiatives and local efforts—from solar-powered smoothies to campus sustainability programs—emphasizing how both individual actions and technological solutions contribute to a more sustainable future.

A subsurface model was used to demonstrate how CO₂ can be stored underground, helping visitors better understand the science behind CCS. Dry ice demonstrations highlighted observable, scientific properties of CO₂.

Visitors walked away with our CCS comic book, short educational stories, and resources to learn more about how CCS fits into sustainability, energy, and climate solutions. To learn more, check out our outreach resources, here.

April 21–22, 2026: The GCCC’s representatives Katherine Romanak and Alex Bump attended the 8th International Offshore Geologic CO₂ Storage Workshop in Bergen, Norway. They also attended a field trip to the Northern Lights Project.

Alex Bump had a presentation entitled, "Derisking composite confinement and implications for containment in layered systems" and presented, "Gulf Coast, USA" on behalf of Tip Meckel.

Katherine Romanak had a presentation entitled, "Monitoring solutions through Citizen Science." She also co-authored a presentation with Abdirahman Omar (NORCE) entitled, "STEMM-CCS – Cssep technique a review"

April 18, 2026: The GCCC’s Principal Investigator, Susan Hovorka, participated in Texas General Land Office’s (GLO's) "Coastal Roundup" public outreach event. This event is advertised as "a free, family-friendly event to showcase the work of the GLO, area organizations, and other state and federal agencies do to protect the Texas coast."

At this event, Susan presented a table display with TXLA CMC outreach materials at R.A. Apffel Beach, located in Galveston, TX. There were approximately 40 groups participating in the Coastal Roundup including several GLO departments, non-governmental organizations (NGO's) and contractors that work in the coastal zone.

April 11, 2026: A GCCC project manager, Ramón Treviño, participated in the Coastal Bend Bays Foundation’s annual "Earth Day / Bay Day" event at Corpus Christi’s "Heritage Park." Ramón presented a table display with GCCC outreach materials, which included demonstrating the presence of gaseous CO₂ in a glass container (despite it being invisible).

Other outreach materials showcased included a physical model of the Earth’s crust with permeable vs. non-permeable strata. The model included an injection "well," which allowed participants to inject air into permeable strata filled with water, thus simulating injecting CO₂ into saline aquifers isolated from shallower fresh-water aquifers. There were also samples of porous and permeable sandstone and non-permeable rock samples, which visitors could test for permeability by dropping water on them and watching the water imbibe into the permeable sandstone samples and not into the non-permeable rock sample. Finally, the exhibit included several flyers in English and Spanish and a comic book explaining the major concepts of CCS (carbon capture and sequestration or storage). The comic book was very popular with children and adults alike. More than 400 members of the public engaged with Ramón and the exhibit during the event.

March 6, 2026: Research Assistant Professor Hailun Ni was Invited as a "PhD opponent" by the Reservoir Physics group at the Department of Physics and Technology, the University of Bergen, for the dissertation defense of Dr. Hilde Halsøy. Her dissertation is entitled, "A Laboratory Workflow for Designing Carbon-dioxide Foam Formulations". also presented a guest lecture to the same group titled "Sand Tank Experiments for CO₂ Storage with Light Transmission Imaging".

March 5, 2026: Research Professor Katherine Romanak provided a remote presentation to the 49th Session of the Scientific Groups of London Convention and 20th Session of the Scientific Groups of the London Protocol entitled, “Climate-Driven Ocean Variability and the Challenge of Monitoring: Lessons from a CCS case study.” To see the agenda for this event, click here.

February 23–25, 2026: Research Assistant Professor Hailun Ni was invited by CO2CRC to present a talk entitled "Sand Tank Visualization of the Effect of CO₂ Microbubble Injection on Plume Migration and Trapping" at the 2026 CO2CRC CCS Symposium held in Melbourne, Australia.

February 23, 2026: Congratulations to the GCCC’s Ph.D. Student, Romal Ramadhan, and his advisor, Seyyed Hosseini, for publishing a manuscript in Advances in Water Resources. Their new manuscript is entitled “Gradual modifiers for storage-conserving truncated porous media models: Accuracy and efficiency in CCS flow simulation.” Learn more about this article here.

February 10–12, 2026: GCCC representatives, Sue Hovorka and Hailun Ni, attended the 2026 Groundwater Protection Council (GWPC) UIC Conference in Fort Worth, TX. Sue and Hailun co-taught a short course focusing on Class VI Regulator Training. They taught the following three modules entitled: 1) Training - Review of Permit-Relevant Properties & Characteristics of CO2; 2) Assessing Sufficiency of Storage Site Characterization (Description & Static Model); and Pre-Injection Testing & Characterization During Well Construction.

February 10, 2026: Thanks to Alex Bump for participating in a roundtable discussion hosted by the International Conservation Caucus Foundation (ICCF) in Washington, D.C. Alex alongside Erik Milito (National Ocean Industries Association), and Hanafi Younes (Captura Corp) discussed offshore carbon capture and storage (CCS) in the outer continental shelf.

In this roundtable, “congressional staff learned about economic opportunities with regard to offshore CCS/direct ocean capture, and how best to align investments in these technologies with benefits to sustainability and improved offshore safety.” The meeting included 25 staffers and representatives from non-governmental organizations who asked great questions about CCS, CO₂-enhanced oil recovery (EOR), next steps, and how they could support opportunities.

January 29, 2026: Sue Hovorka and Vanessa Nuñez-López attended a Powerhouse Texas meeting. For 2026–2028, Sue Hovorka is serving on the Energy Policy Advisory Council (EPAC). The purpose of the EPAC is to give lawmakers trusted advisors and to serve as nonpartisan thought partners to address complex energy issues. The goal is to help lawmakers also address pressure-test ideas and navigate tradeoffs before decisions are made.

January 28, 2026: At UTCCS-8, the Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC) was surprised by the Bureau of Economic Geology’s directorate with a celebratory cake for conducting carbon storage research for over 25 years now! Special thanks to the Bureau’s Director Lorena Moscardelli for sending the cake along with Jay Kipper to congratulate the GCCC Team during a UTCCS-8 luncheon. Tip Meckel, Katherine Romanak, and Ramón Treviño also roasted, we mean, toasted Sue Hovorka and the great advances she has made to carbon storage. She Hovorka started investigating CO₂ subsurface injections long before this technology was on anyone’s radar. Congratulations to Sue, and the GCCC Team through the years, for their great advancements that continue to have global impacts. Read more about this Bureau’s celebration of the GCCC here.

January 27–28, 2026: The Gulf Coast Carbon Center hosted UTCCS-8, which is the eighth organized conference offered every other year that highlights both carbon capture and carbon storage research at The University of Texas at Austin. This meeting was hosted by the Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC), the Texas Carbon Management Program (TxCMP), and the UT Energy Institute. Special thanks to Entropy Inc. for sponsoring this event.

This year, the UTCCS-8 event evolved from a 2-day hybrid event into a 1-day virtual and 1-day hybrid meeting due to a winter-storm system that moved through Central Texas on Saturday, January 24, 2026. This development did not turn away many carbon capture and storage enthusiasts, since ~70 in-person attendees were present out of the 90 people who registered to attend in person for Wednesday, January 28th, 2026. Overall, we had 150 people register for the hybrid event, and sponsors of the Gulf Coast Carbon Center were able to share the virtual meeting details internally for those who had not registered.

In summary, there were 61 presentations scheduled over the 2-day period with two sessions running concurrently: One session had a carbon storage focus led by the GCCC, and the other session had a carbon capture focus led by TxCMP. GCCC presenters included Alex Bump, Angela Luciano, Carlos Uroza, Katherine Romanak, Jungang (Gordon) Chen, Sue Hovorka, Hailun Ni, Tip Meckel, Vanessa Nunez-Lopez. The GCCC's invited speakers included Tim Dixon (IEAGHG), Shuman Yu (UT Austin - PGE), Shujuan Mao (UT Austin - EPS), and Ryosuke Okuno (UT Austin - PGE).

Read a summary of this event by IEAGHG’s Tim Dixon here. Access the agenda and publicly available presentations on the UTCCS-8 page here.

January 14, 2026: The GCCC’s Principal Investigator, Susan Hovorka, is a speaker at a forum hosted by United States Energy Association (USEA) that makes carbon capture, utilization, and storage information more accessible. Learn more about this event here.

January 7, 2026: The GCC’s Sue Hovorka and Tip Meckel previously attended several planning meetings to support preparation of a "roadmap" for carbon management in Texas, prepared by the Great Plains Institute, which has now been released: View the Texas Carbon Management Roadmap and Factsheet.

January 1, 2026: The State Geologic Survey of Texas, known as the Bureau of Economic Geology, has an exciting video series that highlights one of our scientists. Click here to learn more about the Gulf Coast Carbon Center’s (GCCC’s) Environmental Geochemist, Katherine Romanak, and her transition from being a volcanologist to an environmental geochemist working on carbon storage. Watch the video to discover how she found her dream job at the Bureau of Economic Geology's GCCC. Meet other scientists at the Bureau of Economic Geology through this great video experience by clicking here.