Dr. Jason Vogel

 

Dr. Jason Vogel is director of the Oklahoma Water Survey and a professor in the School of Civil Engineering and Environmental Science at the University of Oklahoma. He is a member of the OK NSF EPSCoR Track-1 RII Award titled Socially Sustainable Solutions for Water, Carbon, and Infrastructure Resilience in Oklahoma. The $20 million research project is a social science-led, multi-disciplinary collaboration among social, physical, biological, engineering, and computational scientists. More than thirty researchers from across the state are working together on the project, which began July 1, 2020.

 

For more than 25 years, Dr. Vogel’s research has focused on facilitating and developing solutions for water issues throughout the Great Plains, with a specialization in stormwater and stream management. Prior to joining the University of Oklahoma, he held faculty and research positions at Oklahoma State University in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering and at the U.S. Geological Survey, respectively. 

 

Dr. Vogel's work supports the OK NSF EPSCoR research project's Focus Area 3: Variable and Marginal Quality Water Supplies (V-MQW). The V-MQW Supplies focus area addresses issues surrounding Oklahoma’s water demands, which are projected to increase 600,000 acre-feet per year between 2007-2060. Reliable water supplies are needed to provide for these demands while meeting the state’s goal of capping freshwater use to 2010 levels. However, freshwater supplies are declining due to reservoir sedimentation and groundwater overdraft and are increasingly vulnerable to S2S variability. Concurrently, volumes of oil and gas ‘produced water,’ municipal wastewater, and stormwater are increasing with continued oil and gas development and urbanization. Disposal of produced waters has been correlated with seismicity, potentially impacting infrastructure and resulting in energy production curtailment in some regions. The challenge is finding a mix of solutions that allow Oklahoma’s diverse array of MQW to be economically treated for beneficial use to address water scarcity related to changing seasonal to sub-seasonal weather patterns, waste disposal, and infrastructure risk while supporting continued energy production and economic growth.