Special Issues

We are delighted to announce that there will be two special issues based on contributions to the symposium in the highly regarded international journals: Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment and Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology. Invitations will be extended to authors to extend their extended abstracts into papers, and authors will be able to proactively submit manuscripts.

Two special issues will be focused on full-length contributions deriving from this conference. Details of the special issues are:


Journal: Geomechanics for Energy and the Environment

Special issue title: Accelerating the energy transition with energy geotechnics

Outline: It is clear that to address climate change, an energy transition which makes large-scale use of the subsurface is needed. The subsurface will need to be used in an extensive way to produce and store energy and energy products, provide foundations for energy infrastructure, and dispose of waste products from energy production. There are challenges in understanding material behaviour due to complex coupled phenomena, measuring material properties and upscaling the physical phenomena to engineering scale structures. Uncertainties, heterogeneities and long timescales offer additional challenges, as does bringing technology ever closer to dense populations. In the next decade and decades, society needs to complete the energy transition, and to do so the already substantial changes need to be vastly accelerated. This brings many challenges, which academics, industrialists and authorities need to address together.

Guest editors: Philip J. Vardon, Anne-Catherine Dieudonné, John McCartney, Jean-Michel Pereira, David Smeulders, Guillermo A. Narsilio.

More details will be posted soon.

 

Journal: Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology

Special issue title: Emerging technologies for a sustainable underground space: accelerating the energy transition and adaptation to climate change

Outline: Over the last 30 years, the global total carbon dioxide emissions have increased from about 23 billion tonnes to approximately 42 billion tonnes, which is 5.5 tonnes per person. The CO2 pathways to reach the Paris agreement goals are based on the necessary reductions of net carbon emissions. The Paris Agreement's goal is to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 ⁰C above pre-industrial levels and to "pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 ⁰C", this implies reverting the increasing trend at a rate that is between twice (as a minimum) and five times the trend of the last three decades.

Climate change has not only impacted the ground but the underground as well. Therefore, some of the key challenges for the 21st century are managing energy resources and moving towards cleaner sources of energy and more sustainable practices. Recognising the effects on the underground space and using underground infrastructure more sustainably represent taking the first steps towards contributing to these goals.

Guest editors: Guillermo A. Narsilio, Alessandro Rotta Loria, Asal Bidarmaghz, Qianbing Zhang, Phil Vardon, Wonjun Choi, Francesco Cecinato.

See here for more details: https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/tunnelling-and-underground-space-technology/about/call-for-papers

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