Mac Dowell, Niall
Dr Niall Mac Dowell is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Energy and Environmental Technology and Policy in the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London, where he currently leads the Clean Fossil and Bioenergy Research Group. He is a Chartered Engineer with the Institution of Chemical Engineers and is on the Executive Board of the IChemE’s Energy Centre, a member of the Technical Working Group of the CCSA and the ZEP on industrial decarbonisation and a member of the UKCCSRC. He currently leads a research group of 5 PDRAs, 10 PhD students all of whom are focused on technology development for climate change mitigation and has published work at the molecular, process and network scales in this context. He has given advice to DECC, the IEA, the ETI and the JRC and has travelled on behalf of the Foreign Office to China and Korea to promote low carbon power generation. He is currently the PI on the EPSRC-funded project MESMERISE-CCS and the IEA-funded project FlexEVAL and Co-I on the EPSRC-funded projects Opening Future Fuels and CCSInSupply and the UKCCSRC funded project BECCS-IL in addition to the FP7 Project CO2QUEST. He was awarded the 2010 Qatar Petroleum Prize and the 2015 IChemE Nicklin medal for research excellence in low carbon energy.
Bui, Mai
Dr Mai Bui is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Environmental Policy in the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Imperial College London. She is also a member of the Centre for Process Systems Engineering (CPSE) and co-leads the Clean Fossil and Bioenergy Research Group (CleanFaB) with Dr Niall Mac Dowell. She is a Future Energy Leader at the Energy Centre of the Institute of Chemical Engineers (IChemE). She is also a committee member of the SCI Energy Group. She currently works on the Comparative assessment and region-specific optimisation of greenhouse gas removal (GGR) technologies project (funded by NERC), which studies the region-specific potential of negative emission technologies. In 2017, Mai worked on the project Multi-scale Energy Systems Modelling Encompassing Renewable, Intermittent, Stored Energy and Carbon Capture and Storage (MESMERISE-CCS), which studied the value of flexible CCS, identifying process bottlenecks along the CCS chain. In 2016, Mai completed work on the Opening New Fuels for UK Generation project. She studied the feasibility of firing biomass and biogenic waste-derived fuels (e.g., waste wood, municipal solid waste) in UK power plants. Her work focuses on developing grey-box models of the power plant and clean-up system. Mai completed her PhD at Monash University in Australia (2011-2015). She worked in collaboration with The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to study the effect of flexible operation during post-combustion capture (PCC) of CO2. Her work involved process modelling and dynamic operation of a PCC pilot plant.
Niall is a Reader in Energy Systems at Imperial College London. He is a Chartered Engineer, a Fellow of both the IChemE and the Royal Society of Chemistry. His research is focused on understanding the transition to a low carbon economy. Since 2010, he has published more than 100 peer-reviewed scientific papers in this context. Niall has more than a decade’s experience as a consultant to the public and private sectors. He has worked with a range of private sector energy companies and has provided evidence to members of the Select Committee on Energy and Climate Change. He has given advice to DECC/BEIS, the IEA, the IEAGHG the ETI and the JRC. Niall is a member of Total’s Scientific Committee, was also the only non-US member of the US National Petroleum Council (NPC) CCUS Roadmap Team. Niall has been a member of the technical working group of the Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP), the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) and from 2015 – 2019 served as the Secretary of the IChemE's Energy Centre. Finally, Niall was awarded the Qatar Petroleum Prize for his work on Clean Fossil Fuels in 2010 and the IChemE’s Nicklin medal for his work on low carbon energy in 2015.
Mai is a Research Associate in the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. Her current research is on the topics of CCS, negative emissions technologies (BECCS & DAC), and grid-scale clean energy storage solutions. Mai has first-hand experience in designing pilot plant test campaigns to demonstrate dynamic/flexible operation, including CSIRO’s pilot plant (AGL Loy Yang power station, Australia) and the CO2 capture facility at TCM (Mongstad, Norway). Mai has expertise in developing dynamic process models and surrogate models of CO2 capture processes in different applications. Since completing her PhD (end of 2015), Mai has published 14 peer-reviewed journal papers, a book, book chapter and reports on CCS and NETs for IChemE and Imperial College.
