Earth Science and Engineering and Energy Resources and Petroleum Engineering Graduate Seminar

Abstract

First, I will show you the direct human causes of climate deregulation and their most visible consequences – loss of human life and great suffering.  I will use my own global fossil future scenario to show you how burning fossil fuels will transform the Earth we know into a furnace. I will invoke the “1000 ton” rule in terms of human lives lost to climate change and make a case for both immediate geologic CO₂ sequestration and switching to blue hydrogen and ammonia. At this point, I will urge you to be courageous and make a meaningful difference. My ‘prescription’ for the transition will slow down the rapid rate of energy consumption and buy us time to cut emissions. Second, I will revisit the Anthropocene and 140 years of global mean temperature records. I will introduce the Earth as a complex system of interlinked systems and the miracle of the stable albedo of our planet.  I will then focus on the radiation equilibrium of the Sun-Earth system and how we are destabilizing it. I will show you that in all likelihood we will exceed 2^oC in 2050 and even exceed  4^oC by 2100, and urge you to think about future children’s fate unless we take action now. Finally, I will give a few translations from technocracy to ecology and debunk the two most popular arguments by climate warming denialists.

Bio

Tadeusz (Tad) Patzek is Director of the Ali I Al‐Naimi Petroleum Engineering Research Center and Professor of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering at KAUST. Until December 2014, he was the Lois K. and Richard D. Folger Leadership Professor and Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. He held the distinguished Cockrell Family Regents Chair #11. Between 1990 and 2008, he was a Professor of Geoengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Berkeley, he was a Senior Reservoir Engineer at Shell Western E&P in Bakersfield, CA (1989‐1990), and a Senior Research Scientist at the venerable Shell Development Bellaire Research Center (BRC) in Houston, TX. (1983‐1989).

Patzek is also a Presidential Full Professor in Poland (highest honor) and a Distinguished Member of the SPE. By education, he is a chemical process engineer and physicist trained in catalysis and computational fluid mechanics. In 1983, at Shell, two UT professors, Larry Lake and Gary Pope, introduced Patzek to petroleum engineering and his life was never the same.

Patzek has engaged in the studies of complex systems, focusing on the human factors in ultra‐deepwater offshore operations. He briefed Congress on the BP Deepwater Horizon well disaster in the Gulf, and was a frequent guest on NPR, ABC, BBC, CNN, and CBS programs. In 2011, Patzek became a member of the Ocean Energy Safety Advisory Committee for the Department of Interior's Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE). He co‐ wrote a popular book with a famous historian, Joseph Tainter, "Drilling Down: The Gulf Debacle and our Energy Dilemma."

Patzek, Michael Marder and Mr. Frank Male received the Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences for the best paper in engineering in 2013, "Gas production in the Barnett Shale obeys a simple scaling law."

Since 2003, Patzek has engaged in the studies of sustainability, and industrial agricultural and agrofuel systems, all viewed through the lens of ecology and irreversible thermodynamics. Patzek’s papers in this domain are among his most cited. In 2007, Patzek participated in the OECD ministerial meetings in Paris that coped with the new biofuel mandates established in the US. In 2006 and 2007, Patzek and his son Lucas argued in vain against the irreversible damage of the tropical ecosystems in Indonesia, Malaysia, equatorial Africa and Brazil. Since 2006, Patzek has been teaching a thermodynamically and ecologically rigorous class “E4: Earth, Environment, Energy, and Economics.” Many of his best students at Berkeley and UT Austin took this class. At KAUST, students in Patzek’s E4, created the Students for Sustainability organization in 2019. These days, climate change and global warming occupy Patzek’ attention.

For his work, Patzek received the Desiderius Erasmus Award from EAGE in 2020, and SPE IOR/EOR Pioneer Award in 2022.

Over the last decade, Patzek has maintained a blog, LifeItself, about the environment, ecology, energy, complexity and human activities with some 850,000 unique readers.

Patzek coauthored over 400 papers and reports.