innovationUTAH.com
Linking Utah's Innovation Community
John McLennan, Ph.D., Carbon Engineering
John McLennan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah. He had been a Senior Research Scientist at the Energy & Geoscience Institute and a Research Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Utah, since January 2008. He has a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto, in 1980. He has twenty-nine years of experience in geomechanics with petroleum service and technology companies. He worked nine years for Dowell Schlumberger in their Denver, Tulsa and Houston facilities. Practical applications were developed that allowed for better production assessment and improved recovery. Later, with TerraTek in Salt Lake City, Advantek International, in Houston, and ASRC Energy Services in Anchorage, he worked on projects concerned with coalbed methane recovery, rock mechanical properties determinations, produced water and drill cuttings reinjection, as well as casing design issues related to compaction. Recent work has focused on optimized gas production from shales and unconsolidated formations.
In particular, research interests at the University of Utah have included improving methodologies for forecasting natural gas occurrence in low permeability reservoirs, developing improved numerical techniques for optimizing methods for increasing rate and recovery of natural gas, evaluating protocols for chemically altering the mechanical properties of rocks to improve recovery efficiency of natural gas, and developing methods for more efficient geothermal energy extraction in non-hydrothermal environments (where conductive pathways need to be artificially created in the hot reservoir to facilitate convective heat extraction). He is a board member of the Salt Petroleum Section of the Society of Petroleum Engineers, a member of the Society of Professional Well Log Analysts and the Program Chairperson for the 44th United States Rock Mechanics Symposium to be held in Salt Lake City in June 2010.
Learn more about Carbon Sequestration and how it has been gaining world wide attention.