Dr Olivia Milton-Thompson


Job: Senior Geochemist


Employer: WSP Golder


PhD Thesis: Developing a risk assessment model using fuzzy logic to assess groundwater contamination from hydraulic fracturing


PhD Supervisors: Professors Akbar Javadi and Zoran Kapelan


Olivia is a Senior Geochemist at WSP Golder.

 

About

Geochemist within the UK & Ireland Mine Water Team at WSP with consultancy experience in the mining, water, environmental, and nuclear waste sector, working towards chartership with the Geological Society.Key areas of expertise lie in the prediction of mining contamination, remediation and closure of tailings and/or waste rock, geochemical modelling using PHREEQC to understand the impact of mining on groundwater, geochemical software tools for solving problems in aqueous geochemistry and hydrogeochemistry and using programming tools such as Python for efficient and effective data analysis and interpretation.Olivia has a keen interest in modelling and has experience of contaminant transport modelling in groundwater systems using PFLOTRAN for the nuclear waste industry and of modelling water systems in GoldSim. She has contributed to a wide variety of geochemical projects within the mining, nuclear waste, contaminated land, and water treatment sectors for projects based within the UK and internationally.Olivia has a PhD which focused on assessing the risk of groundwater contamination from shale gas migration in onshore hydraulic fracturing both in Canada and the UK. She consequently has a keen interest and holistic understanding of subsurface extraction and injection techniques and their impacts on groundwater.

 

PhD 

Olivia was a PhD student on the WISE CDT programme between 2015-19 and was based at the University of Exeter.  

In September 2018, Olivia spent 3 months on a research visit to the University of British Columbia in Canada, working with the Energy and Environment Research Initiative under Dr Aaron Cahill and the BC Oil and Gas Commission (BCOGC). She collaborated with MSc and PhD students in the research group to improve understanding of gas migration and well construction, with academics in the mechanical engineering departments to develop cement failure fault trees, and with Dr Laurie Welch at the BCOGC to obtain data from wells in BC. Canada was the main case study for her PhD research project.

Olivia successfully defended her PhD thesis on “Developing a risk assessment model using fuzzy logic to assess groundwater contamination from unconventional gas development in the UK” in January 2020.

LinkedIn: olivia-milton-thompson

Keywords: Hydraulic fracturing, groundwater contamination, fuzzy logic, fault tree analysis, event tree analysis, risk assessment.