News 2026
March 30 – April 1, 2026: Members of the Gulf Coast Carbon Center will attend the SPE-AAPG-SEG CCUS conference:
Carlos Uroza will also chair Theme 5 on CO₂-EOR and Unconventional CO₂ Storage
Monday, March 30 – 11:40 am Oral Presentation, Theme 5, Waterway 6 & 7: Variabilities in Rock Quality in the Frio Formation, Onshore Texas, USA: Implications for CO2 Storage and Reservoir Injectivity – C. Uroza, S. Bhattacharya, S. Hovorka
Tuesday, March 31 – 9:20 am Oral Presentation, Theme 3, Waterway 8: 45Q Parity, Stacked Storage, and the GHGRP Verification Gap: LCA-based Economic Framework for CO₂-EOR with a U.S. Gulf Coast Example – R. Gil-Egui, V. Nuñez-Lopez
Tuesday, March 31 – 9:25 am Oral Presentation, Theme 4, Waterway 6 & 7: Sand Tank Visualization of the Effect of CO₂ Microbubble Injection on Plume Migration and Trapping – H. Ni, R. Okuno, and D. Tang
Tuesday, March 31 – 10:05 am Oral Presentation, Waterway 6 & 7: Access-Constrained Deployment of CO₂ Mineralization in Serpentinized Mafic and Ultramafic Rocks in the United States: A Source-to-Sink Assessment – R. Gil-Egui, E. Owusu-Adjapong, E. Ukar
Tuesday, March 31 – 3:40 pm Oral Presentation, Theme 6, Waterway 5: Are the Fears Justified? Observations of Gulf Coast Fault Seal and Implications for CCS – A. Bump & N. Espinoza
Posters:
- Tuesday, March 31 – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Poster Presentation, Theme 8, Exhibition Hall: Classification and Calibration of Legacy Well Risks for CO₂ Storage in the Gulf Coast Basin – J. Ali & A. Bump
- Tuesday, March 31 – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Poster Presentation, Theme 9, Exhibition Hall: “Model–Map–Monitor”: Targeted Risk-Based Monitoring of CO₂ Migration – P. Arumugam & A. Bump
- Tuesday, March 31 – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Poster Presentation, Theme 7, Exhibition Hall: Optimized Numerical Modeling of Boundary Conditions for Geological CO₂ Storage – R. Ramadhan & S. A. Hosseini
- Wednesday, April 1 – 9:00 am to 5:00 pm Poster Presentation, Theme 5, Exhibition Hall: Assessing CO₂ Storage Potential within the Sunda Strait, Offshore Indonesia –B. Maulana, T. Meckel, C. Uroza, D. Ralanarko
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, 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.
