Ian D. Gates

Ian D. Gates
University of Calgary · Department of Chemical and Petroleum Engineering

P.Eng., Ph.D.

About

406
Publications
53,337
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
8,766
Citations
Introduction
Energy, methane, hydrogen, carbon dioxide, natural gas, heavy oil, and oil sands.
Additional affiliations
July 2004 - June 2023
University of Calgary
Position
  • Professor

Publications

Publications (406)
Article
Full-text available
We introduce an innovative framework integrating Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) impact categories with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) factors, offering a unified approach for ESG assessment and reporting. It covers sustainable development's key aspects, enabling a detailed evaluation of environmental, economic, and social...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose Social aspects are key to accepting and deploying emerging technologies, but it remains unclear what and how technology developers should consider social aspects at different technology readiness levels (TRLs). Here, we present new taxonomy of social subcategories for technology systems at different stages of development using TRLs. A new s...
Article
Full-text available
Prediction of well production from unconventional reservoirs is a complex problem given an incomplete understanding of physics despite large amounts of data. Recently, Data Analytics Techniques (DAT) have emerged as an effective approach for production forecasting for unconventional reservoirs. In some of these approaches, DAT are combined with phy...
Chapter
Accurate prediction of rock elastic properties is essential for wellbore stability analysis, hydraulic fracturing design, sand production prediction and management, and other geomechanical applications. The two most common required material properties are Poisson’s ratio and Young’s modulus. These elastic properties are often reliably determined fr...
Article
Prediction of well production from unconventional reservoirs is a complex problem even with considerable amounts of data especially due to uncertainties and incomplete understanding of physics. Data analytic techniques (DAT) with machine learning algorithms are an effective approach to enhance solution reliability for robust forward recovery foreca...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past few decades, Alberta has witnessed a remarkable expansion in its oil and gas sector. Unfortunately, this growth has come at a cost, as Alberta has become the fastest-growing source of pollutant emissions in greenhouse gases (GHGs), sulphur emissions, and water pollution in Canada. Among these GHGs, methane stands out as the second mos...
Conference Paper
The stress shadow effect is well observed in the field operations of multi-stage hydraulic fracturing and it can greatly influence the fracturing effect. In the research documented here, lab experiments were made with the artificial gelatin blocks to visually examine the stress shadow effect during multi-stage hydraulic fracturing process. A relate...
Article
Full-text available
We conducted an experimental investigation to examine the immiscible radial displacement flows of air invading three-dimensional foam in a Hele-Shaw cell. Our study successfully identified three distinct flow regimes. In the initial regime, characterized by relatively low fingertip velocities, the foam underwent a slow displacement through plug flo...
Article
Full-text available
Given the climate challenge, society is seeking low greenhouse gas emission energy sources. In jurisdictions such as Alberta, Canada where power is largely generated through the combustion of natural gas, geothermal offers a compelling option but it remains unclear as to its economic and technical viability. Here, we examine the potential for an en...
Article
Full-text available
Previous literature reviews on life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) have delved into methodology, case studies, reviews, and discussions on indicators and integration. However, there has been a limited focus on redefining the economic dimension of the LCSA framework and addressing challenges at lower technological readiness levels (TRL) for...
Article
As an efficient hydrogen precipitation site, MoS x shows great promise for energy production and environmental remediation applications due to its low cost, easy modulation, multiple complex valence states, and excellent catalytic performance. Therefore, we review the development of MoS x synthesis strategies, catalytic enhancement mechanisms, and...
Article
Full-text available
Although methane emissions from Alberta's oil and gas sector have decreased in recent years, monitoring these emissions using Continuous Emission Monitoring Systems (CEMS) can be costly. Predictive Emissions Monitoring Systems (PEMS), powered by machine learning, offer an alternative to or can supplement CEMS. However, effective machine learning mo...
Article
Full-text available
We experimentally study the effects of normal stress differences in the immiscible radial viscous fingering instability in a Hele–Shaw cell. Dilute low molecular weight poly(ethylene oxide) (PEO) solutions are used as the displaced fluid to focus on elastic effects without shear-thinning behavior. The molecular weight of PEO is varied to investigat...
Conference Paper
NCG is increasingly being co-injected with steam in heavy oil production systems to reduce heat loss and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to maintain reservoir pressure. Given increased use of NCG co-injection, the validity of conventional subcool models must be revisited since they assume that the steam chamber is comprised of water alone. The...
Conference Paper
The in-situ formation of oil in water emulsions can contribute to the oil mobilization when combined with Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD). The produced fluids in SAGD operations and sand pack SAGD experiments often show the existence of both oil in water and water in oil emulsions. Due to the opaque nature of sand packs, however, it is uncle...
Article
Full-text available
Abstract Aqueous supercapacitors (SCs) have been regarded as a promising candidate for commercial energy storage device due to their superior safety, low cost, and environmental benignity. Unfortunately, an age‐old challenge of achieving both long electrode lifespan and qualified energy‐storage property blocks their practical application. Herein, w...
Article
Mercury (Hg) emissions from coal-fired power plants are extremely toxic and have caused widespread concern. Unburned carbon is considered as a promising adsorbent for the removal of elemental mercury (Hg⁰). However, the relationship between adsorption energy and adsorbent structure is still ambiguous. Here, we innovatively constructed a novel three...
Article
Full-text available
The synergistic promotion by photocatalysis and thermocatalysis is a promising approach for sustainable hydrogen (H2) production. Herein, we rationally design a perovskite-based catalyst with three-dimensionally ordered macroporous structure (3DOM CaTiO3-Au) for photothermal catalytic H2 production from different substrates. The hierarchical 3DOM s...
Article
Full-text available
The economic viability of carbon dioxide electroreduction (CO2R) relies on improved performance accompanied by scalable system design. Membranes are commonly used for the separation of reduction and oxidation products as well as to provide a suitable micro‐environment for CO2R. Commercial membranes often address only one of the key challenges in CO...
Chapter
Heavy oil and extra heavy oil production have increased over the past four decades with the advent of new technology enabling new and more efficient recovery processes. These technologies not only include the practice of cold heavy oil production but also improve understanding of thermal recovery processes as well as new developments in air injecti...
Article
A R T I C L E I N F O Keywords: NH 3 selective catalytic reduction Double-atom catalyst Density functional theory calculations Microkinetic modeling A B S T R A C T Theoretically designing a catalyst with high catalytic activity for ammonia selective catalytic reduction (NH 3-SCR) reaction at low temperature to guide the subsequent experimental syn...
Article
Full-text available
Active control of viscous fingering (VF) is of critical importance for many industrial and experimental systems. Here, we numerically study the electrokinetic control of miscible VF using an externally applied electric field. Simulations for three intrinsically hydrodynamically unstable mobility ratios are carried out using two different configurat...
Article
Full-text available
Closed-loop deep borehole heat exchanger (DBHE) systems for producing heat from geothermal sources have the advantage that the heat transfer fluid is contained within the loop. In this study, for the first time, a U-configuration closed-loop DBHE was examined to evaluate the energy produced per unit energy invested from a 2330-m-deep geothermal res...
Article
Aqueous supercapacitors have gained recent attention as a green energy storage option thanks to their low cost and high safety. However, to date, commercial applications of aqueous supercapacitors have not been realized. To this end, we try to promote the innovation in aqueous supercapacitors with copious V2O5. Admittedly, V2O5 materials are subjec...
Article
Full-text available
Reacting with reductive phenolic hydroxyls (–OH) and methoxy groups (–OCH3) on lignin, silver ions (Ag⁺) were reduced to metallic silver nanoparticles (NPs) with sizes smaller than 40 nm. The resulting Ag/lignin NPs were then physically crosslinked in the cellulose hydrogel, followed by freeze-drying to obtain the final Ag/lignin NP-loaded cellulos...
Chapter
Distributed electricity generation (DG) has received increased attention from researchers and experts in recent times. The economic and environmental benefits and advancement of small-scale power generation technologies are the main arguments for DG. Agricultural wastes (BM) and Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) are viewed as major options for DG. Both B...
Article
Viscous fingering (VF) is a well-known interfacial instability occurring when a viscous fluid in a porous medium is displaced by a lower viscosity fluid. In this work, we show that electrokinetic control of the instability is possible, even in the case of a perfect dielectric viscous defending fluid. Using Hele-Shaw cell experiments in which a nonc...
Article
Immiscible injection of slug(s) into a microchannel with square blocks attached to the bottom surface of the channel is studied using the phase-field approach for interface tracking. It is confirmed that immiscible injection enhances heat transfer by up to 85% compared to miscible injection considering identical thermophysical properties. The diffe...
Article
Full-text available
Rational design of multimetallic synergistic catalysis is a grand challenge in the field of green catalysis because synergistic mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, by exploiting a unique apparent anti-electronegativity polarization in cobalt-titanium-yttrium trimetallic synergy, a unified methodology is demonstrated to activate oxygen and nitro...
Article
Full-text available
Rational design of multimetallic synergistic catalysis is a grand challenge in the field of green catalysis because synergistic mechanisms are poorly understood. Here, by exploiting a unique apparent anti‐electronegativity polarization in cobalt‐titanium‐yttrium trimetallic synergy, a unified methodology is demonstrated to activate oxygen and nitro...
Article
The Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin contains large quantities of deep coal which can be produced as coal bed methane (CBM) reservoirs. The Mannville Formation of Alberta is an attractive CBM play because of its high gas-in-place potential of 4–10 BCF per section depending on coal seam thickness and gas content. One requirement for enhanced reser...
Article
Herein, we report on a 3D MoSx/Zn3In2S6 nanoflower for efficient photocatalytic selective oxidation of benzyl alcohol (BA) to benzaldehyde (BAD) (100% conversion and 96.18% selectivity in 1 hour) with simultaneous H2 coproduction. The experimental results, in combination with DFT calculations, reveal that MoSx not only endows photothermal propertie...
Article
Non-isothermal Rayleigh-Taylor Instability (RTI) has been investigated for incompressible, Newtonian, immiscible flows. Thermal gradients were triggered by imposing a cold and a hot temperature at the top and the bottom side of the domain, respectively. The effects of thermocapillary stresses resulting from temperature-induced interfacial tension g...
Article
Deep eutectic solvents (DESs) have great potential for desulfurization/denitrification of oil. This work investigated the underlying effect of hydrogen bond acceptors (HBAs) in DESs on the extractive removal of quinoline, carbazole and dibenzothiophene (DBT) from oil on the basis of the intermolecular interactions. With the acid-base interaction, q...
Article
As wells shift towards producing or injecting along their entire length, frictional pressure losses and reservoir heterogeneities become larger issues in completion design. There is now general agreement that passive flow control devices (PFCDs) are effective in mitigating these issues. However, the interplay of PFCDs with the reservoir, as well as...
Article
Full-text available
Photocatalytic hydrogen production is a promising route to the provision of sustainable and green energy. However, the excess addition of traditional electron donors as the sacrificial agents to consume photogenerated holes greatly reduces the feasibility of this approach for commercialization. Herein, considering the abundant hydroxyl groups in ce...
Article
The oil sands resource in Western Canada are a considerable energy asset for Canada, but the energy and emissions intensities of producing this petroleum resource are substantially worse than that of conventional petroleum resources. With requirements for carbon-intensity reduction, new, less emissive recovery processes must be developed to enable...
Preprint
Full-text available
For human safety, efficient removal of formaldehyde in indoor environments is essential. However, removing formaldehyde from indoor environment given the temperature and moisture remains a challenge. In this study, a metal-organic framework-based single-atom iron catalyst (FeSA) is proposed as a candidate catalyst for oxidation of formaldehyde. The...
Article
Full-text available
Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) can be used as a tool to understand how products and operating systems can meet the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). However, existing linkages between SDGs and LCSA are limited and an analysis of coverage in literature is needed. In this paper, we propose a generic methodological fra...
Article
Full-text available
Catalytic oxidation of NO and Hg0 is a crucial step to eliminate multiple pollutants from emissions from coal‐fired power plants. However, traditional catalysts exhibit low catalytic activity and poor sulfur resistance due to low activation ability and poor adsorption selectivity. Herein, a single‐atom Fe decorated N‐doped carbon catalyst (Fe1‐N4‐C...
Article
Full-text available
Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) have attracted great interest in photocatalysis, but their activity is hampered by the issue of severe carrier recombination. Here, through a carboxyl group assisted coordination route, MXene decorated with carboxyl groups provides chelation sites enabling coordination with UiO‐66‐NH2(Zr/Ti) (UZT) to fabricate a tigh...
Article
Single‐Atom Catalysts A single‐atom Fe decorated N‐doped carbon catalyst (Fe1‐N4‐C), derived from an Fe‐doped metal–organic framework, is developed by Zhengyang Gao, Hai‐Long Jiang, and co‐workers in article number 2110123. The unique Fe1‐N4 sites in Fe1‐N4‐C enable ultrahigh activity for catalytic oxidations of NO and Hg(0) at low and room tempera...
Article
Conventional high internal phase oil-in-water Pickering emulsions (HIPPEs) have limited applicability as building blocks for fabricating functional materials due to the aqueous condition-dependent stability. The hydrocarbon chain-grafted cellulose nanocrystals (H-CNCs) acted as effective stabilizers to stabilize HIPPE. With the attractive hydrophob...
Article
Full-text available
Nunavut is a territory in Northern Canada partially within the Arctic Circle. Currently, diesel is the fuel of choice for both power and heating. Previous studies (Das & Cañizares, 2016; Hazelton, 2019) have shown that hybrid renewable energy models are feasible alternatives for electricity generation from economic, technical, and environmental per...
Article
The poor stability of organic–inorganic hybrid perovskites hinders its commercial application, which motivates a need for greater theoretical insight into its binding mechanism. To date, the binding mode of organic cation and anion inside organic–inorganic hybrid perovskites is still unclear and even contradictory. Therefore, in this work based on...
Article
The Cover Feature illustrates the concept of using machine learning and data science to predict the energies and properties of CsPbI3 materials. More information can be found in the Research Article by Z. Gao, X. Ding, J. Yao, H. Li and co‐workers.
Article
Full-text available
Asphaltenes from bitumen are abundant resource to be transformed into carbon as promising supercapacitor electrodes, while there is a lack of understanding the impact from different fractions of bitumen and asphaltenes, as well as the presence of transition metals. Here, nanoporous carbon was synthesized from bitumen, hexane-insoluble asphaltenes a...
Article
Full-text available
Aqueous supercapacitors show advantages of high safely, prolonged lifespan, and low cost, etc. but there have never been commercial market products, nor quantitative investigation of practical pouch devices of aqueous supercapacitors. Herein, to achieve their lab‐scale to real‐life manufacture, a unique MoOx for supercapacitor use is constructed by...
Article
The impact of steam generation on Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (SAGD) process economics and environmental impacts have led to various modifications of SAGD including solvent co-injection with steam. One example is the Expanding Solvent Steam-Assisted Gravity Drainage (ES-SAGD) process where 1–5 volume% solvent is injected with the steam into the...
Article
Full-text available
Inorganic metal halide perovskites, such as CsPbI3, have recently drawn extensive attention due to their excellent optical properties and high photoelectric efficiencies. However, the structural instability originating from inherent ionic defects leads to a sharp drop in the photoelectric efficiency, which significantly limits their applications in...
Article
Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) have been intensively investigated and made great progress due to their high photoelectric conversion efficiency and low production cost. However, poor stability and the toxicity of Pb limit their commercial applications. It is particularly important to search for new non-toxic, high-stability perovskite materials. In...
Article
Amphiphilic Janus nanoparticles exhibit higher interfacial activity and adsorb more strongly to fluid interfaces than homogeneous nanoparticles of similar sizes. Taking advantage of both shape and chemical anisotropy on the same particle, Janus particles offer rich self-assembly possibilities for nanotechnology. By using dissipative particle dynami...
Article
Evaporation of salt-water solutions is common in industrial processes and nature. Evaporation kinetics for multicomponent droplets have been investigated previously but most experimental systems have droplets contacting a solid substrate. Here, drying of acoustically levitated salt-water solutions is examined. The results show that the addition of...
Article
Full-text available
Electrochemical reduction of nitrate (NO3RR) has drawn significant attention in the scientific community as an attractive route for ammonia synthesis as well as alleviating environmental concerns for nitrate pollution. To improve the efficiency of this process, the development of catalyst materials that exhibit high activity and selectivity is of p...