FIRST Keynotes
Denis Angers, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada
Denis Angers is a Honorary Research Scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Quebec City. He has over 35 years of experience in researching carbon and nitrogen cycles in soils, with the overall objective of understanding and developing practices to reduce soil degradation and net greenhouse gas emissions through carbon sequestration. His has worked on arable crops and livestock-based cropping systems across Canada, but also in France, Brazil and China. He contributed to the development of the Canadian Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Accounting System. He is former President and Fellow of the Canadian Society of Soil Science, Fellow of the Soil Science Society of America, and Corresponding Member of the French Academy of Agriculture. He currently contributes to the IPCC 6th Assessment Report.
Keynote: “Carbon sequestration in agricultural soils: a Canadian perspective, but not only!”
Franz Lahaie, INERIS, France
After obtaining his PhD in geophysics, Franz LAHAIE was hired at INERIS 19 years ago as a research engineer and then managed a research team in geomechanics. He developed an expertise in risk assessment associated with drilling, hydrocarbon well operations and abandonment, geothermal, and underground storage of natural gas, hydrocarbons, CO2 and hydrogen. In the last 5 years he was involved in several studies on hydrogen underground storage. In march 2021, he was appointed hydrogen project manager in the INERIS strategy department, where he is charge of coordinating INERIS activities related to the safety of hydrogen.
Keynote: “Safety as a core challenge of hydrogen industry deployment”
Samuele Furfari, Free University of Brussels, Belgium
Dr. Samuel Furfari is a recognized authority on energy policy based in Brussels. Between 1982 to 2018, he was a senior official on energy policy in the European Commission. For 15 years he is a professor of energy geopolitics and energy politics at the Free University of Brussels. He is the president of European society of engineers and industrialists.
Keynote: “What are the impacts of energy transition on the geopolitics of energy?”
Jordi Bruno, AMPHOS 21, Spain
Jordi Bruno has a PhD in Inorganic Chemistry, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, an Executive MBA from Stanford University and has over 30 years of experience in the field of waste management, risk analysis and environmental management strategies. The main areas of expertise include groundwater and radionuclide geochemistry, sustainability, chemical risk assessment and evaluation of performance and safety of nuclear waste repositories, toxic / hazardous and geological storage of CO2.
From 2008 to 2021, he was the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Amphos 21 Consulting and from 2009 to 2021, he was the CEO and Chairman of the Board of Amphos 21 Group. From 2000 to 2014 he was Director of the Chair Enresa-Amphos 21 on Sustainability and Waste Management in the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). Since the inception of Amphos 21 in RSK Environmental he is Director of Amphos 21 Group
He is author or co-author of more than 130 published papers and five books, as well as many communications to international conferences and technical reports.
Keynote: “CO2 and Hydrogen storage projects in the Spanish Energy Transition: Perspectives and Reality Check“
Alan R. Butcher, GTK, Finland
Alan R. Butcher is Professor of Geomaterials & Applied Mineralogy at the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK). A geologist by training, Alan leads research into novel ways to image and analyse rocks and minerals in 2D, 3D and 4D. He is specifically active in battery mineral characterization and their traceability, and a strong advocate of cross-disciplinary collaborative science and engineering, with the aim of helping to solve the current energy emergency through a better understanding of the full value chain, from minerals, to metals, through to materials and the final manufactured products, and the recycling thereof.
Keynote: “Unifying the need for new battery mineral sources, novel carbon sequestration strategies, and the protection of soils, whilst at the same time managing public expectations & opinions – a Finnish perspective“
Olivier Vidal, ISTerre, France
Olivier Vidal is a CNRS researcher at the Institut des Sciences de la Terre, Grenoble. Geologist by training, his research is now focused on the energy-raw materials nexus in the context of energy transition to a low-carbon society. He has been scientific coordinator of the European network ERA-MIN on the industrial handling of non-energy raw materials (http://www.era-min-eu.org/), and he is involved in several multidisciplinary projects in collaboration with economists.
Keynote: “The energy-mineral resources nexus in the context of energy transition“
Jean-Daniel Bontemps, LIF - IGN, France
Jean-Daniel Bontemps is a silvologist (PhD in forest science), and is currently research director at the French national institute for geographic and forest information (IGN), and head of the Laboratory of Forest Inventory. For 20 years, he has been conducting researches on the macrodynamics of European temperate forests and their temporal changes, in a changing environmental and transitional management context, with scientific approaches based on observation, monitoring, statistical analysis and dynamic modelling. He was previously junior professor at AgroParisTech where he taught forest science, autecology, dendrometrics, statistics and modelling, and has initiated the European master program Forests and their Environment (Université de Lorraine/AgroParistech). Since 2015, he leads researches on adapting forest inventory programs as tools for the monitoring of climate change impacts on forests, and on long-term dynamics of European forests. He is author or co-author a 50 publications and has directed or co-directed 6 PhD projects.
Keynote: “Forest monitoring in France and Europe – overview and challenges”