In the latest installment of “Texas In Depth,” Lorena Moscardelli, director of UT’s Bureau of Economic Geology and Texas state geologist, takes us behind the scenes of the University’s oldest and perhaps most expansive research unit.
Moscardelli was born and reared in Venezuela. In 1999, she was unceremoniously fired along with 20,000 other employees of the national oil company PDVSA in one day by the new president, Hugo Chávez. Lesli Wood, then a faculty member at the Bureau of Economic Geology working in Venezuela, encouraged her to apply to UT as a Ph.D. student.
After her first stint at the bureau, she went to work for Statoil (now Equinor) in the North Atlantic off Norway, then returned to UT as a staff member who rose to associate director before being named director upon the departure of the bureau’s longtime leader Scott Tinker.
The bureau’s Core Research Center, the size of a big-box home improvement store, immediately brings to mind “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” There, on the J.J. Pickle Research Campus in north Austin, she discussed the role of oil and gas today, how the shale revolution largely ended talk of “peak oil,” and the social-justice aspect of allowing poor countries the energy to develop economically and technologically. She also spoke about the bureau’s past, present and future.
Moscardelli believes in ambitious goals, including eventually replacing fossil fuels with clean energy, but says that given the demands of our increasingly energy-hungry world, “we are not close” to an energy transition. But even as the Bureau of Economic Geology remains a key player in the state’s oil and gas exploration, it also is deeply involved with clean energy research, such as hydrogen and geothermal technology.
