Keynote at the 11th World Congress on Momentum, Heat and Mass Transfer
Prof. Barbosa delivered a keynote lecture at MHMT 2026 in Paris: Repurposing of Legacy Oil and Gas Infrastructure for the Energy Transition: A New Frontier in Wellbore Heat Transfer Modeling (Paper ICMFHT 004, DOI 10.11159/icmfht26.004).
The lecture traced six decades of wellbore heat transfer modeling — from the analytical solutions of the 1960s through multiphase and thermo-structural extensions — and argued that the same foundations now serve a different purpose. More than two million wells in the United States are idle, unplugged, or abandoned, representing a multibillion-dollar liability. Repurposing a portion of that infrastructure for subsurface thermal energy storage turns those liabilities into distributed, long-duration storage assets.