Advancement Awards for Young Scientists go to Berlin and Karlsruhe

The board of the DGMK has announced this year's winners of the DGMK Advancement Award for Young Scientists. Two young scientists from the Technical University of Berlin and the KIT Karlsruhe Institute of Technology were successful.

Carl-Zerbe-Award for research on the thermochemical conversion of wood

The Carl-Zerbe-Award goes to Dr.-Ing. Alba Diéguez Alonso from the Institute of Energy Technology at the Technical University of Berlin. The research work of Alba Diéguez Alonso deals with the thermochemical conversion of wood.

By means of pyrolysis, wood can be converted into coke-like solids ("charcoal" or "biochar"), tar-like liquid products ("bio-oils") and product gas. During the thermochemical conversion of a chemically very complex solid like wood, numerous chemical reactions and transport processes occur simultaneously. This can lead to secondary reactions in which, for example, undesirable mono- and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons can also be formed. Alba Diéguez Alonso has equipped an experimental reactor with a novel combination of on-line analysis techniques and contributed with her investigations to the understanding of the process. She has precisely characterised the bio-cokes obtained from pyrolysis and studied their suitability for applications such as the improvement of barren soils and carbon sequestration. Her research has thus provided important scientific findings on a partial aspect of the energy system transformation.

The award will be awarded within the framework of the DGMK event "Thermochemical conversion - key building block for future energy and raw material systems" May 23, 2019 in Dresden.

Georg Hunaeus Prize for the characterisation of carrier rocks in Northern Germany

The Georg-Hunaeus-Prize is awarded to Dr. Ivy Becker from the Institute of Applied Geosciences at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Ivy Becker's doctoral thesis focused on the characterisation of relatively dense sandy and carbonatic hydrocarbon carrier rocks.

Drill cores from kilometre-deep boreholes are cost-intensive and are therefore taken comparatively rarely. In exploration for hydrocarbons, rock samples from surface outcrops, mostly quarries, are therefore often used to characterise the rocks in the geological underground. The physical rock properties can be quantitatively determined in the exploration and in the laboratory, but the question always arises as to the transferability of the surface data to the conditions underground. With this question Ivy Becker has investigated the most important reservoir rock types for Northern Germany and Central Europe as a whole. She compared surface outcrops with core material from the underground and made a concrete evaluation of selected surface outcrops for their suitability as analogues to the underground conditions in North German natural gas fields. The challenges included the prediction of storage properties in three-dimensional space and the integrated consideration of the matrix and fissure pore space. The relatively dense carrier rocks investigated still have considerable economic potential for natural gas production in Northern Germany in the future. With her work, Ivy Becker was able to make important new contributions to their understanding.

The Georg-Hunaeus Prize will be awarded on 25 April 2019 as part of the DGMK Spring Conference "Innovations in the E&P Industry will be held.