In an article that appears in the November 25th edition of the Austin Business Journal, INTERA Chief Executive Officer, Marsh Lavenue; Sr. Vice President, Van Kelley; Director of Hydrologic Services, Barney Austin; and Senior Water Resources Engineer, Neil Deeds, discuss the 45% growth of INTERA’s water division as a result of drought conditions. To view the article, click here.
Continue ReadingArchives for 2011
INTERA Names Alaa Aly Vice President
INTERA is pleased to announce that Dr. Alaa Aly has been promoted to Vice President. He will be in charge of the company’s northwestern U.S. operations. This includes INTERA’s Richland office and on-site staff supporting environmental restoration efforts at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site. Dr. Aly has been with INTERA since 2001 and served as a Senior Water Resources Engineer responsible for managing water resource projects in Florida and Colorado. In 2008, Dr. Aly moved to INTERA’s Richland, Washington office where he has been serving as the company’s Hanford Program Director for the past three years.
Continue ReadingINTERA’s Dr. Abhishek Singh Named New Associate Editor for the Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management
The Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management has named INTERA Senior Environmental Scientist, Abhishek Singh, Ph.D., as an Associate Editor to the Editorial Board. In this capacity, Dr. Singh will evaluate technical papers and articles covering a variety of topics including systems analysis (i.e., optimization, uncertainty analysis, and water resource decision-making) and evolutionary optimization and machine learning techniques applied to water resources problems. Dr. Singh is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an expert in water resources systems analysis.
Continue ReadingINTERA Wins Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project in Japan
INTERA, in association with Mitsubishi Materials Corporation (MMC) and Mitsubishi Corporation (MC), was recently awarded a contract with Japan Carbon Capture and Storage Company (JCCS), a consortium of over 30 companies, to support the geological sequestration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in Japan. Geological sequestration involves the long-term underground storage of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, typically in depleted oil and gas reservoirs. INTERA’s scope on this project entails developing an appropriate methodology for guiding the assessment of risk of CO2 leakage via abandoned wells.
Two hypothetical sites have been provided as the basis for numerical simulations to estimate the extent and properties of the CO2 plume in the reservoir as a function of time. Other detailed process modeling will involve a quantitative estimation of CO2 leakage via different potential leakage pathways (e.g., between cement seal and casing, or annular cement and formation) as a basis for carrying out a probabilistic treatment of leakage rates and amounts for different types of wells drilled into the CO2 reservoir. Ultimately, the results will be used to rank these different types of wells in terms of their potential for leakage.
Continue ReadingINTERA’s Larry Coons Receives 2011 Excellence in Reclamation Award
On September 8th, 2011, the Mining and Minerals Division of the New Mexico Energy, Mining and Natural Resources Department presented INTERA’s Larry M. Coons, P.E. with the 2011 Excellence in Reclamation Award for his work at the former Velarde Mill near Velarde, New Mexico. From the early 1980s until 2005, the Velarde Mill processed mica ore mined from the US Hill Mine located 25 miles northeast of the Velarde Mill in the Sangre de Cristo mountain range within the Picuris Pueblo Grant.
The award, presented at this year’s New Mexico Mining Association Convention in the Pueblo of Santa Ana, recognized Mr. Coons for his success in reclaiming technically challenging tailings ponds through the use of a stable positive-draining landform and aesthetically pleasing vegetative cover at the former Mill site.
Continue ReadingINTERA Develops Adjoint Capture Function for MODFLOW
Scientists and engineers at INTERA have completed the initial development of a new subroutine to MODFLOW-2005 that allows efficient calculation of capture functions, commonly used in the management of groundwater resources. Capture functions quantitatively define the net contribution of surface water relative to withdrawal from wells in the aquifer. Evaluation and mapping of capture functions can be used in the optimal location of pumping wells and in determining optimal pumping strategies.
Traditional techniques used to estimate capture functions include analytic solutions or the parameter perturbation approach which typically requires execution of thousands of forward numerical simulations. The new approach developed by INTERA uses the adjoint methodology and results in computational efficiencies by a factor equal to the number of nodes in the model, typically on the order of several hundred thousand. With such computational savings, it is now feasible to address the uncertainties in groundwater models by embedding the problem in a stochastic framework.
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