Grant Wach is Professor of Petroleum Geoscience and Stratigraphy in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Dalhousie University. Prior to his Dalhousie appointment in 2002 he was Geoscience Research Associate at Texaco Upstream Technology (now Chevron) in Houston, Texas providing technical expertise for business units, operating affiliates and partners worldwide. He has considerable exploration and commercialization experience in West Africa, the Far East, the Americas and Western Europe. He still works with the energy industry, but today, he now serves as a mentor, helping students become successful geoscientists.

His research goal is to understand the entire petroleum system, particularly the reservoir component. Understanding the internal complexity of the reservoir isn’t easy; more than 50 per cent of the oil and gas is left in the ground and we must try and find more effective methods for recovering these resources. This is part of the path to sustainability. There is also a potential to store CO2 in the reservoirs, serving two purposes – reducing Greenhouse gas emissions and recovering more oil by using the CO2 to push‐out the remaining oil trapped in the rocks. He advised the Nova Scotia government on Carbon Storage and Sequestration and completed the first evaluation of basins in the Maritimes for use for Carbon Storage. He was Principal Investigator of the Gas Seepage Project (GaSP), the first multi-stakeholder initiative that has evaluated and conducted methane (CH₄) emission inventories from legacy coal and oil and gas extraction sites in Atlantic Canada.

Professor Wach studied at Western Ontario (Hons. B.A. Geography); South Carolina (M.Sc. Geology) and the University of Oxford (D.Phil. Geology).