Geoffrey Maitland

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. He studied Chemistry at Oxford University where he also obtained his doctorate in Physical Chemistry. After a period as an ICI Research Fellow at Bristol University, he was appointed to a lectureship in Chemical Engineering at Imperial College in 1974. His research focused on molecular interactions and the transport properties of fluids, including polymer systems. He spent a secondment with ICI Plastics Division from 1979-81 and became a senior lecturer in 1983. In 1986 he moved to the oil and gas industry with Schlumberger, where he carried out research in oilfield fluids engineering, including the use of colloidal systems for well construction, reservoir stimulation and production enhancement. He held a number of senior technical and research management positions in Cambridge and Paris, most recently as a Research Director. He rejoined Imperial College in September 2005 as Professor of Energy Engineering and his current research is now 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 public reports and been a member of the 2018 UK Government CCUS Cost Challenge Taskforce.

Geoff is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers, the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Energy Institute. In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. He 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. He was awarded the IChemE Chemical Engineering Envoy Award for 2010 for his media work explaining the engineering issues involved in the Gulf of Mexico oil-spill. In 2011 he chaired the independent review of the UK Offshore Oil and Gas Regulatory Regime (‘The Maitland Report’), received the Rideal Lecture Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2012 and was awarded the Leverhulme Medal of the Society of Chemical Industry in 2017. In 2021 he was awarded the IChemE Ambassador Award and the RSC Exceptional Service Award. 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 of the Shell-Imperial Digital Rocks Lab. As well as continuing to work with IChemE, he was a Trustee of RAEng from 2017-2020, chairing the Audit and Risk Committee, and Chair of the RSC Publications Board and RSC Trustee from 2016-2020. He was appointed CBE in 2019 for services to Chemical Engineering.