POTSDAM -- A Carnegie Mellon University professor will speak at Clarkson University Friday, April 1 about engineering to mitigate climate change.

David Dzombak, from Carnegie Mellon's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and director of the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research, will speak on "Geologic Sequestration of CO2: Evaluating and Monitoring Seal Rock Integrity" at 3:30 p.m. in Bertrand H. Snell Hall Room 213.

Dzombak is the third speaker in the New Horizons in Engineering Distinguished Lectureship Series, which is dedicated to improving the understanding of important issues facing engineering and society in the 21st century.

The leading technology under development for management of CO2 separated and captured from large emission sources, such as electric power plants, is carbon capture and geologic sequestration (CCS). Worldwide, only a few large scale tests of CCS have been conducted. In the U.S., the Department of Energy has established seven regional partnership programs for large-scale testing of CCS, including evaluations of the rate of leakage from the storage reservoirs.

Dzombak's talk will present an overview of CCS and the challenge of risk assessment in relation to deployment of the technology.