Imperial researcher receives lifetime achievement award

Professor Martin Blunt has been presented with a lifetime achievement award by the European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers.

The European Association of Geoscientists and Engineers (EAGE) presented Professor Martin Blunt with the Desiderius Erasmus Award, their most prestigious prize, at their Annual Meeting in Paris.  The award is presented each year to a geoscientist or engineer in recognition of a career of outstanding and lasting achievements in the field of resource exploration and development.

In the citation EAGE commended Professor Blunt’s work “Martin has made internationally recognised contributions to reservoir engineering across length-scales and applications.  He has pioneered pore-network models too understand multiphase flow in porous media.  He has redefined the field of pore-scale modelling in geologic materials.”

Professor Martin Blunt has worked at Imperial College London for 18 years and is the current Chair in Petroleum Engineering in the Department of Earth Science and Engineering. He is also the Director of the Qatar Carbonate and Carbon Storage Research Centre, a 10 year, $70 million strategic collaboration between the College, Qatar Petroleum, Shell and the Qatar Science and Technology Park.

“I am truly humbled and honoured to have received this award from the EAGE” said Professor Blunt said “Over the years I have been blessed to have worked with truly remarkable people from around the world, I’ve also had the privilege to teach really exceptional and talented students and if it wasn’t for them, and everything that I’ve learnt from them, I wouldn’t be able to do the research that I am doing now.”

Professor Blunt's research interests are in multiphase flow in porous media with applications to oil and gas recovery, geological carbon storage and contaminant transport and clean-up in polluted aquifers. He performs experimental, theoretical and numerical research into many aspects of flow and transport in porous systems, including pore-scale modelling of displacement processes, and large-scale simulation using streamline-based methods. He is on the editorial boards of three academic journals Transport in Porous Media, Water Resources Research and Advances in Water Resources and has recently published a new book Multiphase Flow in Permeable Media.

The Erasmus Award is one of the annual prizes awarded by the EAGE and is considered the highest and most prestigious of the 12.