Adam Hawkes

Adam Hawkes is the Director of the Sustainable Gas Institute and Professor of Energy Systems in the Dept of Chemical Engineering. He is Editor-in-Chief of the new open-access Elsevier journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Transition.

His research team focuses on methodologies and applications for quantitative assessment of energy systems. Building from engineering fundamentals, he analyses the technical, economic, security, and environmental aspects of energy system transitions, and then applies these to provide evidence to both engineering and energy/climate policy debates. He is an expert in analytical assessment of individual technologies and systems of technology and infrastructure.

His areas of research specialism are:

• Quantitative assessment of sustainable energy transitions via energy systems modelling (optimisation, simulation, forecasting)
• The role of natural gas, hydrogen, and low carbon gases in present and future energy systems.
• Methane emissions in energy supply chains, from detection and measurement through to mitigation strategies.
• Engineering-economic analysis of heat sector decarbonisation; modelling, technologies, infrastructures, interfaces, pathways
• Investment in and operation of micro-grids and smart grids under uncertainty (stochastic programming and game theory)
• Decentralised energy resources, demand side management, and smart energy networks
• Microgeneration
• His background includes energy and climate change consultancy, energy trading, government policy impact assessment, and ICT development. Adam is an author of more than 200 scientific contributions, including a number of high impact White Papers.

Selected Publications

Journal Articles

• Dubey L, Speirs J, Balcombe P, et al., 2023, Future use of natural gas under tightening climate targets, Futures, Vol:150, ISSN:0016-3287, Pages:1-13
• Grant N, Hawkes A, Mittal S, et al., 2021, Confronting mitigation deterrence in low-carbon scenarios, Environmental Research Letters, Vol:16, ISSN:1748-9326
• Trutnevyte E, Hirt LF, Bauer N, et al., 2019, Societal transformations in models for energy and climate policy: The ambitious next step, One Earth, Vol:1, ISSN:2590-3322, Pages:423-433
• Realmonte G, Hawkes A, Gambhir A, et al., 2019, An inter-model assessment of the role of direct air capture in deep mitigation pathways, Nature Communications, Vol:10, ISSN:2041-1723
• Balcombe P, Anderson K, Speirs J, et al., 2016, The natural gas supply chain: the importance of methane and carbon dioxide emissions, Acs Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering, Vol:5, ISSN:2168-0485, Pages:3-20
• Pfenninger S, Hawkes A, Keirstead J, 2014, Energy systems modeling for twenty-first century energy challenges, Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews, Vol:33, ISSN:1364-0321, Pages:74-86