Geoff Maitland is Professor of Energy Engineering at Imperial College London and a Past President of the Institution of Chemical Engineers (2014-15). His career has spanned academia and industry, spending 20 years in oil and gas with Schlumberger and over 20 years at Imperial, first as a young lecturer from 1974 and then from 2005 in his current post. For many years his research has been centred on how we can continue to use fossil fuels for most of this century without causing catastrophic climate change, particularly through carbon capture and storage (CCUS). He has chaired several CCUS reports and been a member of the 2018 UK Government CCUS Cost Challenge Taskforce.
He has published over 150 papers in the scientific literature, four books, numerous book chapters and 10 granted patents. Geoff was awarded the Hutchison Medal by the Institution of Chemical Engineers in 1998 and served as President of the British Society of Rheology from 2002-2005. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the IChemE Chemical Engineering Envoy Award in 2010 for his media work explaining the engineering issues involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill. He chaired the post-Macondo review of the UK Offshore Oil and Gas Regulatory Regime in 2011 (‘The Maitland Report’). Amongst other awards, in 2012 he received the Rideal Lecture Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the SCI Leverhulme Medal in 2017. He is the Founding Director of the Qatar Carbonates and Carbon Storage Research Centre, a $70M 10 year academic-industry research programme based at Imperial College London, and is currently Director of the Shell-Imperial Digital Rocks Lab. He was appointed CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours List for services to Chemical Engineering.