Robert Finley, Ph.D.

Dr. Robert J. Finley is the Director of the Advanced Energy Technology Initiative at the Illinois State Geological Survey, Institute of Natural Resource Sustainability, at the University of Illinois, Champaign, Illinois. He joined the Illinois Survey in February 2000 after serving as Associate Director at the Bureau of Economic Geology, The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Finley's area of specialization is fossil energy resources and carbon sequestration, areas in which he has a combined 30 years of experience. His work has ranged from large-scale energy resource assessment, addressing hydrocarbon resources at national and state scales, to evaluation of specific fields and reservoirs for coal, oil, and natural gas. He currently leads a major project on carbon sequestration in the Illinois Basin, the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium, one of the U.S. Department of Energy's regional carbon sequestration partnerships, aimed at researching carbon sequestration as a response to global climate change. Dr. Finley also led the geological carbon sequestration assessment team for the FutureGen site selected at Mattoon, Illinois. Dr. Finley has served on committees of the National Petroleum Council, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the National Research Council, the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum, the World Resources Institute, and the U.S. Potential Gas Committee. In 2009, he visited China as part of a World Resources Institute-U.S. Department of State sponsored exchange of U.S. and Chinese experts on geological carbon sequestration. Dr. Finley has served on two past task forces of the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission (IOGCC) that developed model legislation and regulations for carbon sequestration, currently serves on their regulatory practices task force, and is the Associate Representative to IOGCC for Illinois. He was appointed to the Illinois Carbon Capture and Sequestration Legislative Commission by Governor Pat Quinn. Dr. Finley holds a Ph.D. in geology from the University of South Carolina; he is also an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.