Hi! My name is Josh Muketha and I am a senior at Princeton University this year. I am a Civil & Environmental Engineering major with a focus on Structural Engineering, and pursuing certificates in both Materials Science & Engineering and Environmental Studies.  For my senior thesis, I will be working on a problem related to the feasibility of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and pumping it into underground storage sites.  There are large formations full of brine into which the CO2 could be injected. However, the brine formations inevitably come into contact with abandoned oil wells that are plugged with cement. The CO2-saturated brine will be acidic, so it will gradually attack the cement, and could cause enough damage to allow the gases to escape. This project will explore the durability of cement subjected to carbonic acid at high temperatures and pressures, representative of the conditions in deep wells. We will study the structure and properties of the corroded cement as part of a program to predict the leakage rate from brine aquifers. 

I’ll be working together with Ed Matteo on this project, which is part of the broader CMI project at Princeton.