Resource Recovery, Confinement, and Remediation of Environmental Hazards

The papers in this volume arose out of two workshops entitled "Confinement and Remediation of Environmental Hazards," and "Resource Recovery," as part of the IMA 1999-2000 program year. These workshops brought together mathematicians, engineers and scientists to summarize recent theoretical, computational, and experimental advances in the theory of phenomena in porous media. The first workshop focused on the mathematical problems which arise in groundwater transport of contamination, and the spreading, confinement and remediation of biological, chemical and radioactive waste. In the second conference, the processes underlying petroleum recovery and the geological time scale of deformation, flow and reaction in porous media were discussed. Simulation techniques were used to simulate complex domains with widely-ranging spatial resolution and types of physics. Probability funcional methods for determining the most probable state of the subsurface and related uncertainty were discussed. Practical examples included breakout from chemical and radioactive waste repositories, confinement by injection of pore plugging material and bioremediation of petroleum and other wastes. This volume will be of interest to subsurface science practitioners who would like a view of recent mathematical and experimental efforts to examine subsurface science phenomena related to resource recovery and remediation issues.