School of Energy Resources Welcomes Yun Yang to Center for Economic Geology Research

The University of Wyoming School of Energy Resources (SER) welcomed Yun Yang to the research team in the Center for Economic Geology Research (CEGR) as an assistant research professional.  

 

Originally from Wuhan, China, Yang earned her undergraduate degree in petroleum engineering from the University of Tulsa. She then earned both her master’s and doctoral degrees in energy and mineral engineering from Penn State University.

Bringing an arsenal of petrophysical skills and experience to SER, Yang worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory working on multi-scale feasibility study of underground hydrogen storage in depleted hydrocarbon reservoirs, and carbon dioxide (CO₂) mineral storage in mafic and ultramafic rocks. She also completed her first postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary, Canada, where she served as a team lead for a field-scale injection project. Her primary duties involved designing and optimizing the injection sequence to maximize CO₂ capacity in deep, unmineable coal seams.

 

Her scholarship has included experimental modeling in gas adsorption and diffusion to enhance unconventional gas recovery as well as multiphase flow in porous media with a special focus on the sorption kinetics in unconventional reservoirs and the potential application to carbon sequestration.

 

Starting in her new role at SER, Yang will lend her expertise to the CarbonSAFE initiatives in both the Sweetwater Carbon Storage (SCS) Hub and the Williams Echo Springs project. Her abilities will be utilized in the lab facilities, working on fluid flow in porous media and running core flooding experiments to characterize fluid transport in porous media, as well as helping to model subsurface reservoirs.

 

“Yun fills a critical role for us, especially with the influx of new data from three deep wells,” says Fred McLaughlin, director of CEGR. “Her expertise will be a tremendous asset in the lab and within our modeling group, and her background in both legacy and emerging energy industries is a perfect fit for SER’s broad research portfolio.”

 

Drawing on a diverse set of experiences, Yang’s ability to apply skills across different disciplines will enable her to make meaningful contributions to a variety of advancing field projects at SER, ensuring that her impact is not only deep but also wide-ranging.

 

“I am very pleased to be at SER as it allows me to get involved in real-world applications, which is different from my previous experience in the fundamental sciences,” says Yun. “I can bring my knowledge from fundamental geoscience into the field applications and I look forward to making meaningful contributions to the exciting projects going on in Wyoming.”