The University Centre in Svalbard

UNIS is the world’s northernmost educational institution, located in Longyearbyen. UNIS has technical and scientific equipment, laboratories and infrastructure for teaching and research in Arctic natural science and technology for sea, land and atmosphere. The disciplines include Arctic Biology, – Geophysics, – Geology and – Technology.

All teaching is in English, and about half of the staff and students are from abroad. UNIS is a state-owned corporation, promoting strategic collaboration in research and education with the ten Norwegian universities. The administrative language is Norwegian.

Homepage: http://www.unis.no

The Arctic Geology Department is looking for a highly motivated, independent geo-scientist for a full-time three-year PhD student position on shale geomechanics in the context of large-scale CO2 storage.

The Arctic Geology Department consists of six full time Associate Professors and Professors and four UNIS-based PhD students. In addition, Adjunct Professors and external PhD students contribute to the research and teaching at the department.

The vacant PhD position is within the field of structural geology/geomechanics. The position is externally financed through a project entitled “Sharing and recycling shale mechanical data to enable gigaton CO2 storage (RecyclShale)” funded by the Norwegian Research Council. The RecyclShale project is led by the Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (NGI, project leader Jung Chan Choi), with UNIS and SINTEF as academic project partners and a strong industry project partner team, including Equinor, Gassco, Vår Energi, TotalEnergies, Aker BP, and Wintershall DEA.

The overall project objective is to ensure the long-term integrity of new CO2 storage projects by enhancing the understanding of shale mechanical behavior through maximizing the use of existing data. RecyclShale will compile existing shale mechanical datasets in collaboration with Norwegian operators and participating institutes, improve the understanding of factors affecting mechanical shale properties by integrating mineralogical information, and apply supplementary information from innovative small sample tests that can recycle small samples. The project will provide a practical correlation and tools to estimate site-specific shale information.

Within this framework, the selected PhD candidate will develop her/his own research project that will contribute to the overall project goals, with particular emphasis on integrating mineralogical and geological information into a practical shale mechanical correlation. The academic goals should be realistic and achievable given the 3-year position with no teaching duties and significant data already in place. The PhD project will potentially involve fieldwork (in Svalbard and elsewhere), drill core work (using drill cores in Svalbard and from the Norwegian Continental Shelf), and data analysis combined with laboratory analyses (at NGI in Oslo and SINTEF in Trondheim). The focus will be on geomechanics and integrity of shale-dominated successions, which represent the most important lithology for regional scale cap rocks for the growing CO2 storage industry on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.

The primary research focus will be on characterizing the mineralogy, fracturing and meso-scale structural heterogeneities of organic-rich shales exposed on Svalbard, particularly the Late Jurassic-Early Cretaceous Agardhfjellet Formation and the Middle Triassic Botneheia Formation. The successful candidate will work on a range of scales and features, including examining fractures, faults and regional décollements as well as drilled and fully cored four wells that penetrate the entire Agardhfjellet Formation. The candidate is expected to log fractures and other structural heterogeneities in both drill cores and at relevant outcrops in central and eastern Spitsbergen. Quantitative data will be acquired with a handheld XRF system available at UNIS. The Svalbard drill cores will be compared to shale samples from the Norwegian Continental Shelf and Switzerland and put in a geological context taking also in effect the variable burial and uplift. Furthermore, the candidate will investigate shales from various boreholes on the Norwegian Continental Shelf (through physical core samples and wireline logs) to decipher the effects of burial and uplift on the geomechanical properties of shale-dominated successions. The candidate is expected to analyze scattered geomechanical data in partner’s laboratories, to correlate them with field-measured geological and mineralogical information, and explain the regional discrepancy in shale mechanical data and validate it using laboratory and geomechanical modeling approaches

Please follow the links through the online application portal:
https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/267241/phd-position-in-arctic-geology