Considering the company he will now be keeping as this year’s winner of the Sidney Powers Memorial Award, it is not surprising that John Kaldi is overwhelmed.
There was something else, though, he is enjoying almost as much.
“It is with great pride to note that I am the first Australian to receive it,” he said.
When he first heard, he wanted to make sure he was hearing it right.
“When (then AAPG President) Claudia Hackbarth phoned me to tell me that I had received the SP Award, I was absolutely gobsmacked (he points out that that’s Australian uber-emphatic for “surprised”). I said to her ‘Claudia, you’ve got to be kidding.’”
She wasn’t.
When Kaldi, professor of petroleum geology and engineering at the Australian School of Petroleum, University of Adelaide, thinks of those who have won the award – and here he mentions Les Magoon, Mike Forrest, Larry Meckel, Mitch Harris, Koen Weber, Marlan Downey, Arnold Bouma, Fred Meissner, Peter Vail and Bob Sneider – he is humbled by the company he now keeps.
“I never, and to this day, still cannot compare myself to these legends,” said Kaldi.
He has met many of them, incidentally, and said that what he learned from them – how to work, how to lead, how to explore – was particularly invaluable.
Kaldi and CCUS
Kaldi is at the forefront of work surrounding carbon capture, utilization and storage. It is, he said, an exciting time to be in such a field.
“Demand for CCS/CCUS is growing globally. There are now 50 commercial-scale projects in in the world, projects capturing and storing more than 420 million tonnes of CO2 per annum,” he said.
There are many more commercial-scale projects in development, meaning many more millions of tons of CO2 that can be captured and kept from entering the atmosphere.
He keeps a close eye on all that and also on who in the world is doing what and how well they’re doing it.
“The United States probably leads the charge in CCS/CCUS, primarily due to the IRS 45Q regulation.”
This provides significant tax incentives to operators for putting anthropogenic CO2 into the subsurface. But for all the advances in the field, there could be even more challenges.
“Globally (and even in the U.S.), the sector faces significant challenges around costs and financing, technological development, regulatory uncertainty and public/political perception,” said Kaldi.
He said the debate on CCS/CCUS is polarized and that polarization leads corporations, countries and other jurisdictions to a point of “inaction paralysis by analysis.”
“A major criticism of CCS/CCUS has come from fossil fuel opponents, who claim that CCS is a ploy to justify continued oil, gas and coal production,” he said.
Kaldi said that concern is shortsighted. Still, he sees where it comes from.
“It is the problem of costing money without obvious direct ways of generating revenue. In addition, permitting procedures are complex, slow to implement and regulatory flip-flops are common,” he explained.
The good news in all this is that ongoing research and lessons from global commercial and demonstration-scale projects have made significant advances, especially in capture and separation technologies and storage reliability. The key, he believes, will be pushing more projects to commerciality.
“Policies and legislation will need to address the above challenges to meet projected demand. Crafting policy is relatively simple; implementing policy is the difficult part,” said Kaldi.
Kaldi’s Road through Industry, Academia
Kaldi’s career has taken him from New York, where he studied for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Queens College, to Cambridge for his doctorate in carbonates and then to Calgary, Canada, where he worked for Shell. Next stop was Plano, Texas, where he was a research geologist for ARCO, then with ARCO to Jakarata, Indonesia where he worked first as a geological specialist and then as chief geologist for VICO before heading to Australia and academia.
“While in industry, I learned from a lot of very smart people (including some of the Powers Award recipients I mentioned) the significance to the bottom line of understanding geology. I got interested in seals (perhaps the least appreciated part of the petroleum system), as well as the importance of not only looking at rocks, but in understanding their petrophysical responses in the subsurface (such as porosity, permeability, capillary pressure, relative permeability etc.),” said Kaldi.
These skills were all fundamental to his understanding of CO2 sequestration, which is an area he entered in 1998 under the influence of Peter Cook and colleagues in the CO2CRC, Australia’s leading research body for CCS/CCUS.
Of the corporate/academic divide, he said “translating the economic significance of such studies to exploration and production and thus to the commercial value of a project was and remains one of the biggest differences between an industry and an academic perspective on the science that we do.”
The other difference is one of approach.
“Whereas in industry, the multidisciplinary approach is de rigueur, academics tend to work in discipline silos,” said Kaldi.
As for the award itself, he said, “I stand on the shoulders of many giants. I would indeed like to recognize some of them, as this is as much their award as it is mine.”
His journey didn’t start the way you might expect. He enrolled at New York University as a pre-med student, intent on following his father and uncle into the medical profession.
“This was not to be, and much to the betterment of thousands of potential patients of mine, I became a geologist!”
He remembers, during a break in his education, meeting famed geologist Robert Ginsburg, who invited him on a field trip to see the Miami Oolite.
“I was hooked … both by the rocks (carbonates) and the kindness and generosity of Bob in taking me along,” said Kaldi.
After returning to New York’s Queens College, he had the good fortune of having Charlotte Schreiber (“the Evaporites Lady”) as his adviser.
“Charlotte taught me the importance of networking and of how important it was to join professional societies and to volunteer in their leadership roles,” said Kaldi.
He said he has always followed such advice, which explains his volunteering with international professional associations (AAPG and the Society of Petroleum Engineers) and the local societies everywhere he has lived. He co-organized AAPG’s International Conference and Exhibition meetings in Bali (2000), Perth (2006), Singapore (2012) and Melbourne (2015). He had two stints each as Distinguished Lecturer for AAPG and SPE.
“At Shell, I had my first taste of working with engineers,” said Kaldi.
There he met “gurus” like Pete Rose, Mike Forrest and Bob Sneider. Later, when he worked with ARCO, the company’s then-President Marlan Downey, asked him, along with Bob Sneider and Chuck Vavra, to organize a Hedberg Research conference on seals, held in Crested Butte, Colo.
“This led to several publications and another Hedberg conference on seals in 2000 in Australia. Meanwhile I had transferred to Jakarta with ARCO Indonesia where I worked on development of fields in the offshore northwest Java and the Bali North concession areas,” he said.
It was in 1997 when he took the opportunity to move to University of Adelaide to set up the Australian School of Petroleum and where, shortly thereafter, he helped set up the aforementioned CO2CRC.
Legacy
Asked about his successes, he said that when he thinks about work on carbonates, seals or CCS, he said he is most proud of being founder and inaugural head of the Australian School of Petroleum, a multidisciplinary school teaching petroleum geoscience, petroleum engineering and petroleum business management.
“My legacy, if there be one, is not the nice building, not the fancy name but the hundreds of students and researchers we turned out, who, when they left us, were ready to ‘hit-the-ground-running’ in the petroleum (or CCS) industry and are today some of the leaders in these areas,” he said.
As for those who come next, those who might someday stand on his shoulders, his advice is simple:
“One, choose a career that benefits society, not just makes you money; two, once you have chosen whatever it is that you want to do, work hard at it (sloth and laziness are soul destroying), and three, most important, make sure to have fun (because if you are not having fun at what you do, you won’t be any good at it!)”
There is something else, though – someone else, more precisely – who must be mentioned.
“Besides the aforementioned individuals who have shaped my career, I have had the love (and longsuffering tolerance) of Paula, my wife of 38 years. She was my spouse, companion and support on the journey that I described. Sadly, she is no longer with us, having passed away in 2020. Unexpectedly, ‘Meg’ appeared in my darkest of times, a bright light and understanding partner who has brought light to my world again. I am an extraordinarily lucky man!” said Kaldi.