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Christophe Tournassat Honored by Clay Minerals Society2 min read

by Christina Procopiou on November 14, 2022

Energy Geosciences Division

Christophe Tournassat, currently an EESA visiting faculty scientist in the Energy Geosciences Division, has been named by the Clay Minerals Society to receive the Marion L. and Christie M. Jackson Mid-Career Clay Scientist Award for his contributions to the clay mineralogy field. He will receive the award during the 60th anniversary of the Clay Mineral Society in Austin next May. The award is designed to recognize mid-career scientists for excellence in contributing new knowledge to clay minerals science through original and scholarly research. 

Tournassat is an expert in reactive transport modeling whose work has spanned a range of topics from pore-water chemistry in claystones and the fate of iodine in clay barriers to sorption processes on clay minerals and anomalous transport properties of clayey materials. Improving what is known about these topics is essential to various energy-related applications such as the underground storage of radioactive waste, which involves engineered and natural clay barriers.  Clays are also important for geological carbon storage (GCS) technologies wherein carbon dioxide is injected and permanently stored underground in mineral form. Contributing to these important topics has required Tournassat to develop and apply expertise in the chemical and physical behavior of clays through experimentation, characterization, and modeling over a wide range of scales from the molecular to that of the underground research laboratory. 

Tournassat has worked at EESA in various capacities since 2013 when Senior Scientist and Geochemistry Department Head Carl Steefel invited him to collaborate on DOE projects exploring new horizons in clay science that make use of reactive transport modeling and molecular dynamics. The pair also co-edited a book with Ian Bourg and F. Bergaya on “Natural and Engineered Clay Barriers.” In 2020, Christophe Tournassat became a Professor at the University of Orléans, France, and, in 2021 Visiting Faculty at Berkeley Lab.

“Christophe has had a great impact on our field not just in the U.S. and France but across the globe. His work spans a breadth of topics using modeling, experimentation, and characterization, perhaps unique among present-day clay scientists,” Steefel said. “He is on the leading edge in developing models for simulating the behavior of contaminants in clay rocks, especially for the problem of geological disposal of waste in the subsurface. The models are the first of their kind in the world, and are of great interest to U.S. Nuclear Waste Program, as well as the Programs in Europe and Asia.”

News & Events

Study Sheds Light on Microbial Communities in Earth’s Subsurface2 min read

August 16, 2023

  From the tops of tree canopies to the bottom of groundwater reservoirs, a vast amount of living organisms interact with nonliving components such as rock, water, and soil to shape this area of Earth known as the “critical zone.” Over half of Earth’s microbes are located in the subsurface critical zone, which ranges from…

Carl Steefel Honored in Goldschmidt Session on Reactive Transport2 min read

August 2, 2023

The contributions of Carl Steefel to the reactive transport modeling scientific community were recognized in a session held in his honor at the recent Goldschmidt 2023 conference (Lyon, France). Goldschmidt is the foremost annual, international conference on geochemistry and related subjects, organized by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society. The session was…

DOE Funds Projects to Advance Forest Carbon Dioxide Removal Efforts and Agricultural Soil Carbon Conservation4 min read

August 1, 2023

The DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management (FECM) and Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) recently announced $5 million in funding for four projects–two from Berkeley Lab with EESA leadership. The projects selected offer “promising solutions” to the nation’s climate change challenges by helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and will “accelerate their deployment…

Quantifying the strength of the land carbon sink3 min read

July 26, 2023

This article first appeared at nature.berkeley.edu/news. The world’s forests, grasslands, and other terrestrial ecosystems have played a substantial role in offsetting human carbon emissions—a capability that UC Berkeley researchers say would be threatened by continued global change. The assessment, published today as a new review paper in Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, presents a comprehensive analysis of…

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