Geoscientists are essential for shaping a sustainable future, and today's conversation dives deep into how they can transition away from traditional fossil fuel industries towards more innovative and environmentally friendly roles.

I chat with Emer Caslin, a business development manager at ICRAG, who shares her journey from the oil and gas sector to exploring geoscience's contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals. We discuss the importance of engaging younger generations in geoscience, emphasizing the need for increased visibility and relevance in schools. Emer highlights the collaborative efforts between geoscientists and social scientists to tackle pressing challenges like climate change and resource management.

Takeaways:

• Geoscientists have a crucial role to play in shaping a sustainable future for humanity.
• Transitioning away from fossil fuel industries is essential for geoscientists to remain relevant.
• Engaging younger generations in geoscience is vital for the future of the field.
• The collaboration between geoscience and social science enhances understanding of environmental issues.
• Mapping geoscience to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals highlights its importance in various sectors.
• Communication skills are increasingly important for geoscientists to convey their impact on society.

Mentioned in this episode:

• ICRAG
• EAGE
• Geoscience in Action
• Emer Caslin on LinkedIn

Storiesforthefuture.com

Welcome back listeners, and there's so many more of you lately.

And to all of you new listeners, I'm so so happy that you're here, that you found this podcast and I hope you enjoy this season and you might want to go back and listen to all their episodes as well.

But now to today, I want to start by sharing one of my favorite quotes from an earlier episode.

And it goes like geoscientists are crucial for the future of humanity.

You might think thats stretching it a bit, but I believe todays episode will help support this claim.

Whether youre familiar with the geoscience world or not, im confident that todays conversation will give you something to think about when it comes to this fields role in the future.

One thing is absolutely certain, the oil and gas industry is far from the only career path for the geo heroes of tomorrow.

Welcome to stories for the future.

This is a podcast that aims to make you feel excited and hopeful about amazing possibilities ahead of us.

My name is Veslmayklavna Spargje and I'm on a mission to discover how we can all live good lives, have interesting jobs, take care of our planet, and look after everyone who lives here.

I believe that everyday people have the power to shape the future.

Together we can create a world that we're all excited about.

Join me on this journey as we explore these ideas and remember the future is in our hands and I'm confident we can make it really good.

My guest today is Emer Kaslin.

Emer is a business development manager at ICRAG, a research center in applied geosciences in Ireland.

Like me, Ymir has a background as a geoscientist and she also spent a big part of her career working in oil and gas.

However, she made a transition and went into some really interesting work mapping geoscience to the sustainable development goals.

You will soon hear more about that.

Geoscientists can be used for so much more than you think.

I certainly had some aha moments, and I bet you will as well.

Heres Emir Kaslin.

Welcome to the podcast imirae.

Thank you very much.

It's great to be here.

We first got in touch earlier this year, I think it was in winter and in June we actually got to meet in person as well, which was great.

I was just thinking about this, that after connecting with you, I learned so much about things that is happening in geoscience related to the future opportunities for people like us, and that I'm really grateful for.

It's opened so many doors or ideas for me so that is fantastic, because, as I, you're a geoscientist by education, and I think we started out in our careers quite in a similar way, and we also both did a shift at some point.

So I wonder if you could start by sharing a little bit about your career trajectory perhaps, and your pivots and the reasons behind it.

Absolutely, yes.

Yeah.

So I worked in the energy sector, pretty much the oil and gas sector, for about 16 years of my career.

So it was an amazing experience.

I worked internationally on really interesting, technically challenging posts as well.

I had gained a fantastic wetland network of friends that I still have from all over the world.

It was with SLB, it was a little bit like the United nations in terms of the breadth of international representation.

So I did always though, in the back of my head, always want to move into something more sustainability focused, and I think with a busy life, and I then had two kids and it meant it was really a very difficult thing and to transition, and very much not an obvious transition.

I wanted to move into sustainability, more humanitarian areas, and for me, that represented a departure from geoscience.

So I suppose I felt reluctant, to a degree as well, to do that, but very much, I think, because it was just difficult.

It was busy.

There was no real pivotal moment.

I did have my third child and I realized, I suppose it was now or never to take that leap.

I think that coincided with COVID coming along.

So I had to kind of manage the kids and then I upskilled myself.

So I just wanted to step outside the energy sector and just see what was happening and immersed myself in all things related to, like, energy and climate action sustainability.

So I did online training and energy transition, and then I worked as well.

I volunteered with various professional societies, such as the SPE and the SEG.

And I was invited by board members Maria Angela Capello and Anna Shaughnessy to co author a paper they had started to work on mapping geoscience to the 17 sustainable development goals.

And this, and I suppose in combination with attending geoscience conferences outside of oil and gas, where I saw climate action being to the forefront, really kind of made me realize there actually is a future in geoscience and we do play a critical role.

So one of those conferences was with ICRAG and.

Yeah, that's what I'm working with today.

Yes.

So before we jump back to the sustainability atlas or geoscience sustainability.

Sustainability Atlas, is that what it's called?

It's a geophysical sustainability atlas is what we first put together and then we followed that up with a publication called Geoscience in Action.

So we will come back to it, but before we go there, because that is, I think it's so interesting work, but before we go there, I crag.

That is something I never heard about before I met you and I think I really like.

I crack everything I seen from it so far.

I wish we had something similar in Norway.

So could you just share what it is and what your work involves working with them?

Yeah, sure.

So we.

By the way, I never heard of iCrack.

I was working internationally.

So again, it was one of these organizations I stumbled on during my time out.

I think when you stop and you take time out, you get to explore a bit deeper.

So ICRAG is kind of a government partially funded geoscience research centre.

We have about 150 geoscientists.

They're dotted, it's a virtual centre, so they're dotted around about ten different institutions based in Ireland, but working on projects internationally.

So we drive applied research in areas that are critical to all of the sustainability pillars, economy, environment and society.

So we look at three challenges.

We look at the sustainable discovery of energy resources and raw materials that are required for decarbonisation.

We also look at how can we secure and protect our terrestrial, our groundwater, our geomarine environments, protect them from.

And we get involved in climate mitigation and adaptation.

And then we have an aspect which is around Earth science in society.

So this is twofold, it's around protecting society from Earth's hazards like flooding, landslides.

But it's also looking at how we engage with the public around geoscience.

So around whether that be the enablement of low carbon projects or environmental protection.

It's that whole public perception side of things.

So that's the research remit.

So I'm business development manager, so my role is very much to grow our collaborations with institutions and with industry.

It's to really ensure that the research is aligned with public and private sector priorities.

So, yeah, that's it in a nutshell.

And I really.

It's so interesting how you told me about how you have quite a lot of social scientists as well, alongside the earth science people.

So it's this combination which is so interesting.

Yeah, and it's.

I wish I could say we did have a lot, we don't have so many, we certainly have vast majority geoscientists, but it's.

We do have social scientists, psychologists as well, that work alongside geoscientist and engineer, because I suppose with us there's a recognition that it was a creation of a sustainable society, involves decisions, and those decisions are not just on the hard science, they're influenced by individuals and communities and industry.

So it's very much in policymakers as well.

So it's very much an ecosystem of enablement for this.

And I suppose a lot of, there's a growing number of our research projects that are requiring this kind of social impact input into them.

It could be things around engaging with the public on the positioning of wind turbines as well.

It can be engaging with them as well on what their perception of mining is and the importance of mining going forward for supplying critical raw materials for the energy transition.

But I think those are things like sabo sometimes can be seen as controversial, but there's also things that don't seem to be controversial.

There's the restoration of peatlands, but that has a social component because you can no longer in Ireland use the peatlands and burn that you have to.

They're now being restored and protected.

But that has a just transition aspect to it, too.

So it's really across the board, all that interfacing we do with the earth is so many social components and it's.

Very easy to forget them sometimes.

And yeah, all of these topics you mentioned, they are really like hot topics in many areas, I think when it comes to wind and mining and all of that.

Absolutely.

We have the same in Norway.

So.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It's just.

It's meaning, I mean, it's not saying that geoscientists have to study social science or to be better at that, but they certainly have to be more, increasingly more better at translating what they do and working in a more collaborative group outside of, you know, typically it's with engineers, but I think there's a much broader cohort of disciplines now for each of these things.

Yes.

Okay.

As I said earlier, we met in June at this big conference in Oslo, which is called the eage annual, which stands for European Union, for geoscientists and engineers.

And with ICRAG, you did a fantastic job at setting up this so called energy transition theater.

And I got to, because of you, to lead a panel conversation related to how we can increase understanding between the inside and outside of the oil and gas industry.

And it was really, really interesting and I think it was a great conversation.

And one of the topics that came up a lot of just during the whole conference as well as you told me, is how people skills, technology experience, et cetera, coming from the industry can be repurposed to speed up the energy transition.

And with that, we come to the work that you have done with the sustainability Atlas.

I keep forgetting what it's called.

Yes, don't worry.

There's two of them.

There's the geophysical sustainability atlas is where we started, and then we've grown.

And we brought up a second publication because the geologists and the other geoscientists weren't happy.

They wanted to.

They wanted to be included.

So then we had geoscience in action, too.

So don't worry.

Yeah, so, okay, could you please tell us what this is and its purpose, and also how you would like to see it being used?

Yes.

So I suppose it was during this kind of downtime where I was doing my reskilling.

And in parallel, on the other side of the Atlantic, there were two ladies.

Maria Angela Capello and Anna Shaughnessy are on the board of the SCG.

They had, you know, I think we both, in parallel, were thinking about doing something around promoting the worth and the value of geoscience.

I was seeing things like dwindling enrollment numbers in universities as well.

And I was quite surprised, as I said before, about the breadth of activity geoscientists were engaged in, again, towards climate action and sustainability more broadly.

Anna and Marie Angela were thinking the same thing.

So we saw, I suppose, that the subject really faced a bit of a crisis and needed a reboot in terms of its perception and a better recognition of the role that we play.

Because even if it wasn't people having a negative perception, it was nearly.

They didn't know that.

They didn't really know what a geoscientist did.

So there's an understanding that the sustainable development goals from the United nations represent a blueprint print around a sustainable future.

So we thought it made sense to map the work that geoscientists do to those 17 sdgs.

We thought we'd probably get about four or five of the sdgs.

It was clear SDG seven would be one.

There's other ones around sustainable cities of the future, etcetera, and water groundwater management.

But actually straightforward for us to map the discipline of geoscience to all 17 of the sdgs.

You know, it wasn't a huge amount of work, so we learned a lot ourselves as well.

It was looking at how we're involved in disaster risk response from climate and geohazards.

Again, as I say, things like water resource management, the near surface, we were.

But we were all kind of deeper subsurface geoscientists, but we looked into the near surface techniques that obviously contribute to sustainable cities of the future, which is SDG eleven, and resilient cities as well, you know, when it comes to natural hazards, and then things like the provisions of all energy forms and decarbonization techniques.

Some of the SDGs, the kind of the lighter ones, were around SDG 16 and 17.

So peace, justice, and strong institutions and partnerships for the goal really tie into what we mentioned before, that idea of social governance, advocacy and policy influence, and geoscientists having to be more communicative for advancing the SDGs through here as well.

So that kind of partnership element of it then, you know, became very, very clear and very obvious that there'd be a cross pollination of knowledge sharing from geoscientists with different sectors to feed into the enablement of these different sdgs.

So, yeah, that's what we did, and it's gone forward.

As I mentioned, we had a follow up geoscience in action we've seen.

So it's been great through social media as well.

And Maria Angela in particular, has spearheaded so much this and made so many connections internationally.

So we've seen, like, multiple examples of it being used in university curriculum to really demonstrate, in a kind of simple way the multiple applications of the science used as well by professional societies and industry.

And, yeah, I think one of the big things we wanted to do out of this as well was to, you know, obviously to showcase what we do, but I think also to instill a sense of pride in geoscientists themselves, in their domain, for them to understand the breadth of what they can do in the opportunities.

We created a wheel, which you'll see on the publication, which, again, marks all 17 sdgs with geoscience in the middle.

I saw that as a really good way to unite the various sectors, seeing that the discipline itself is in the middle, but the applications are.

Are multiple.

And I think that can lead to an understanding of huge potential for knowledge sharing.

And as you saw a lot in the EAG knowledge and technology repurposing, a lot of what I saw as well in the various conferences I attended and things that you're touching on here as well, in terms of bubbles, is that when they talked about geoscience, the petroleum geoscientists tended to be left out of the discourse.

That's the impression I got.

And with the sdgs, multiple people have said that SDG seven, which is clean and affordable energy, is like a golden thread that runs through all the other sdgs and enables a lot of the others.

It's energy, it's hugely important.

And I think that presents a really positive opportunity for those working in petroleum.

And again, as you mentioned, the EAG, you saw, you see a lot of that in action, that repurposing from oil and gas into the energy transition technologies.

So I think that's a uniting kind of aspect of it as well too.

So, yeah, absolutely.

I do see, because these are not obvious, but some of the ones related to energy are maybe the first you would think about.

But did you have any kind of surprises when mapping these, the goals, something that you had never thought about could be an application for geoscience?

Yeah, things like, I suppose the marine geoscience part of things as well, monitoring marine and coastal change and geohazards as well, submarine geohazards.

I probably knew so much about that, but that would have been kind of a new one as well.

And the agri foods side of things as well, even geothermal for supporting agri foods, things I didn't know so much about, as I mentioned, like the near surface geoscience as well.

So that's a huge element of very kind of urban geoscience.

That's something I kind of learned about too.

And that whole aspect of resilient cities and sustainable cities of the future.

And that was one that I saw so many subsectors getting involved in and having to work in a collaborative way.

Because when you think about sustainable cities, it's, yeah, it's hazards, but it's also raw materials, sustainable use of raw materials to build these sustainable cities, and then it's the energy that's going to be used for them too.

And there's multiple kind of sub sectors that feed into that.

So, yeah, and then I just did learn a lot, and I'm continuing to learn about that social element, that kind of communication, geoscience, communication and collaboration, and the importance of the social aspect to enable all of this, you know, to enable these low carbon projects to get off the ground.

Yeah.

And how to communicate to the public also in a way that is easy, but, yeah, understandable.

Understandable, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's important and often missing, I guess.

I think you spoke to somebody as well.

There's another part as well, was the early sdgs.

No poverty and zero hunger.

Joel Gill wrote a book as well, mapping geoscience and sustainable development goals, which is excellent.

And he has an organization, geology for global development.

So that's another kind of aspect of very positive geoscience application.

Absolutely.

Do you see, because I see in the networks that I'm a part of for geoscientists and engineers and others, iunion, for instance, where we can have different reasons for wanting geoscience to become more popular for students, it has dropped.

I think you said as well, the interest for this path and then the oil and gas sector could be very interested in that increasing again for, of course, get more people for.

But what do you think is the best way to get younger people excited about geoscience?

And then not only because what was the case when we were students, perhaps that you had the lucrative oil and gas industry there in the horizon, but for all the other applications, what do you think is the best way to do that?

Yeah, I think it's hard.

I think it is going to be a tricky one.

And as you say, there's lots of stakeholders involved in this, be that the universities themselves and the professors that are in charge of these courses, but also the industry, the oil and gas industry, you say, would be concerned about their pipeline of expertise.

So it's a huge thing.

There's nothing niche about this and there is a lot of kind of initiative starting.

I think the Geological Society of London have a strategic alliance around universities in the UK and how can we onboard more students and kind of make, yes, reboot the subject?

I think it probably does have to start early.

I think we've spoken before and we talked about the atlas, Mariangela talks about the interest in kids in geoscience.

I even see my five year old as well, constantly showing me interesting rocks and that does peak at the age of seven or eight.

Dinosaurs, volcanoes, lovely shiny stones, and then that's it, peters off after that.

So how do we maintain that momentum?

And I suppose schools engagement is really important.

I think going into schools and spending some time with them, if that's possible at all.

There's a program actually we're running in ICRAG, but it's, it's in the UK as well.

It's called get into geoscience.

It used to be called girls into geoscience, but there was then a kind of a recognition that actually we weren't, we didn't have a dwindling number of girls relative to boys, it was just dwindling in general.

So it was remarketed.

Get into geoscience.

What we're beneficial in that program, in that we actually spend time, we do projects that span several months with the students, we do projects about mining, we do projects about geothermal energy, we get the kids, we get Lego involved, we get the kids to get hands on experience in it and to come up with their solutions as well.

And I think as well as that, I heard it at the strategic alliance for GSL.

They talked about kind of train the trainer a little bit as well.

So the teachers, the parents, these are the ones that are the main influence for kids, more so than people that just pop into the school.

There's a combination there as well.

So even trying to get geoscience into the geography curriculum, I'm not sure what it's like in Norway or other countries, but certainly in Ireland we don't have standalone geology, but UK they have less and less a levels, geology courses.

How do we incorporate it through other disciplines?

You know, there's chemistry too.

So I think that school's engagement is key, really.

Obviously there's the policy side of things too.

So it's really important that we work closely with policy makers.

Again, getting policy in for geothermal, getting policy in for carbon capture and storage, etcetera.

Again, that requires communication as well.

It's very multi pronged, I think.

I do think overall we have to be more solutions focused.

We always.

There's a bit of a bubble with geoscience.

We talk about geoscience all the time and how great it is.

But on the outside of that bubble, not many people, you know, it doesn't mean so much to so many people.

So how do you make it resonate with people?

And I think that's where it should become more solutions focused, that it's not standalone, but it's part of a solution.

Like I mentioned, the sustainable cities.

How do we achieve all the sdgs and what part do we play for that?

So looking at it from that angle, I think just on the other thing, I always remember Ian Stewart said it was think about like, kids are always interested in outer space.

Can we mark it geoscience as inner space?

So that's a kind of more of a blue sky thing, but that's the kind of direction we should be looking at.

We need to start looking outside the box, I think.

Yes, and make it relevant for people's everyday life so that they see the connections to everything that we use.

And I.

Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of initiatives out there.

There's an initiative for geothermal as well.

There's storybooks for kids and stuff about that.

So I think more and more of that is good.

But yeah, we can't ignore the policy side of things too.

It's in ICRAG.

When we talk about the public, the public is multiple publics, so it's good children, it's university, it's civil society at large, and it's policymakers as well.

So, yeah, different opportunities for each of them.

Okay, so going back, looking back at the eage conference that we both attended, you have been there arranging this energy transition theater twice.

Yep.

Yes, correct.

So just for people not very familiar with it, this is a huge conference being arranged in different parts of Europe every year.

I used to to attend it before, I guess you did as well, perhaps.

Yes.

So it's kind of a place where you meet the work family, your international work family.

Yeah.

And it was very interesting, I think, to come back and see it a lot was very, very much the same from my point of view, like seeing the exhibition hall and all the stands and all the companies.

But what was new for me was the energy transition theater, like this part of the exhibition hall.

But what are your thoughts?

Do you have any kind of, like, things you are thinking after attending this or arranging this for the second time?

Yeah, yeah.

Is it going?

Yeah.

So we were invited.

So it's actually myself and my colleague Francesca Martini, she's our grants manager.

We were invited last year to help kind of curate the programming of it.

So we saw this has been a great opportunity, a bit of a blank check from EAG for us to put in some content and organize the programming.

I think because ICRAG is an institute, his research very much mirrors certainly the energy transition aspects of the EAG.

It made sense.

We do a lot on critical minerals and things like public perception, as I mentioned, as well as carbon capture and storage and geothermal and wind energy.

So it made sense for us to assist on this.

Yeah, I think it's a really good opportunity, I mean, for.

I would say, and I've heard people that have been on us as well, being on the theatre and been on various panels that we've organized as well, that they've been able to speak, I suppose, more freely about what the work that they're doing and how it contributes as well.

It's a bit more democratic in that there's no hierarchy there.

So when we have panel sessions, like on our first day, we had a panel session about the future of geoscience.

So we had people that were very high up in the likes of total, those that had just started their career in Equinor and those outside the sector too.

So it's a real kind of combination of people, because when it comes to energy transition, when it comes to climate action, it's on everybody's radar, it's on everybody's agenda.

So therefore the discussion and conversations should be across the board in terms of both seniority, but also in terms of sector and expertise.

I think that's something I mentioned, you know, getting people in from the wind sector as well, to talk to those from oil and gas.

I think that's a big part of what we've done, too.

The mineral sector is, I think, more advanced when it comes to stakeholder engagement because they've had to deal with a lot more of us than those in oil and gas.

So we've tried to open up conversations and dialogue about that, too.

Yeah.

So I think it's.

What we've tried to do with it is to make it as broad as possible and as free for people to speak.

And I think one aspect of that, if I can say, is bringing you in as well.

So it was really.

It was great to have somebody from, and it was yourself and Anders as well, who are very much from outside the sector now, I know that's where you start, you both started, and to get your perspectives on and your insights and, you know, your observations on what you're seeing within the eage and all of the kind of technology and perspective shifts, I would say, as well, towards the energy transition, just to burst that bubble so that you can actually see what's happening and actually open up the conversation with how people working in oil and gas as well, what their perception is, how do they feel about inside versus outside.

And again, just elevating the conversation beyond, as you say, finger pointing.

So that's the kind of thing.

That's the kind of area I would like the energy transition theatre to move in as well as.

And we had such excellent sessions as well on things like repurposing technology research for critical minerals as well, and things like offshore wind sector.

We did a full session on how can we, or what are the barriers facing the norwegian offshore wind sector.

So a real combination, I think, of technical and more discursive sessions, I think, are the way we'd like to continue going.

I think.

Yeah, I think it was great.

I had a fantastic experience and I think it was very relaxed atmosphere and very human.

So, yeah, I really enjoyed it.

Great.

Hopefully it will just grow maybe twice the size.

Yeah, we would like it to be bigger.

Can I just say next year and somewhere more central as well?

I think that would be the ideal.

So a hint, hint to Eigen.

Yes.

Okay, I think we will wrap up.

I think I have one last question, actually, which is on my mind a lot of.

Because we talked a lot about repurposing and reskilling, and I wonder because I don't see this a lot because I'm not inside the industry.

So it's hard to know what is actually happening.

But do you have a feeling for how easy it is for people to see how they can reskill or repurpose their skills?

I couldn't really tell you for.

Yeah, it's because I've left the sector.

Yes, I kind of left at the early days of energy transition, pretty much there wasn't energy transition wings of the company before I left.

So it's really hard to see.

I definitely see more people that I knew that are making that transition too.

So there certainly is a move in that direction.

I couldn't really quantify what it is.

I know for us, and I know this is not necessarily the question, but just in terms of how easy it can be.

I know for us in our research centre, we're in our second phase of research.

Our first phase was when it came to the resources was exclusively raw materials and petroleum exploration.

Then by the end of the first phase of our research, about six years, the irish government made a decision to not explore hydrocarbons anymore.

So therefore all of our researchers that we're working on oil and gas exploration had to repurpose skills, data, technology, expertise.

All of that went exclusively in towards energy transition.

Exactly.

You're talking about a big cluster of the researchers that moved in that direction.

So I definitely know that it's for sure a possibility that went into practice on our side.

I don't necessarily know on the industry side how many positions there are, how many jobs there are either.

But definitely from a technical point of view, it's not a huge transition.

It's very possible.

It shows quite clearly how possible it is to shift if you are forced to, in a way, you have to.

So, yeah, what we're seeing as well.

Is we had a lot of researchers working on raw materials and mining and a lot of those areas that they worked on and mapped and modeled, etcetera.

Now we're investigating those for geothermal.

So that's again, that knowledge transfer towards the energy transition from something more extractive is happening again, the peatlands as well.

What's happening underneath the peatlands?

So people look at the kind of the near surface, but what about deeper down?

Is there potential for geothermal there too?

So, yeah, yeah, it's certainly not unsurmountable, I would say.

No.

Exactly.

Okay, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you very much.

I really appreciate it.

And as I said, I appreciate so much everything that I learned after connecting with you.

So thank you.

Yes, you too.

And thanks for coming and bursting the bubble to an extent at this year's EAG.

So, yeah, happy there'll be more of that.

Yeah, I hope so.

I hope so.

Thank you.

Well, what do you think about that?

For me, there are so many takeaways from this, but I think the main ones are twofold.

First, it's absolutely doable and really essential for the future for geoscientists to transition away from fossil fuel industries.

Second, we need to engage younger generations in this field, more geoscience into schools.

As always, I will put all the links in the show notes and also a way for you to find Yimer if you should have more questions about her work, if you haven't already.

I really hope that you subscribe to the podcast so that you don't miss the next episode.

And if you have ideas, guest room recommendations, or just want to chat about this season's topic of bubble bursting and bridge building, you can reach me on storiesforthefuture.com or on LinkedIn.

Thanks for listening.

Take care, and I will be back soon.