The US President Joe Biden convened a virtual meeting of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change (MEF) on 20 April in order to galvanize efforts to limit global warming to 1.5C. He proposed four "pillars of action": decarbonising energy (including with CCUS on fossil fuels); ending deforestation; tackling non-CO2 greenhouse gases par...
Under the Japanese Presidency, the G7 environment and energy ministers agreed and issued their communiqué on the 16 April. They acknowledge the current global energy crisis but reaffirm their commitment to accelerating the clean energy transition to net zero GHG by 2050 and with a diversification of supply sources to enhance energy security and aff...
GoMCarb is a US DOE funded project intended to develop offshore CCS capabilities for the Gulf of Mexico (GoM). It has been running for 5 years, led by the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at the University of Texas at Austin. This annual meeting was held in conjunction with the SECARB Offshore project and had 217 attendees. This blog will cover pri...
Following on from the UK announcement earlier this month of up to £20bn for CCUS in the UK, we welcome the announcement today of the CO2 sources selected for negotiations on support to capture their CO2 and supply it to the two Track 1 Clusters. Congratulations to the projects and companies selected. Eight sources were selected from the government'...
We welcome the announcement today by the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer that the UK government will invest up to £20bn in UK CCS over twenty years, as part of a "Clean Energy Reset". This is the most the UK has ever invested in CCS, and should allow the lead UK Cluster projects to proceed to investment decisions and construction, and the oth...
The Gulf Coast Carbon Center (GCCC) is an industry-funded research programme run by the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin. The GCCC started in 1998 and has some 18 industry sponsors. This industry funding allows the GCCC to be leaders in the field, rather than followers, addressing future topics before they become issu...
India has the presidency of the G20 this year, and has moved quickly to hold energy-related meetings to work towards new agreements and initiatives to be agreed by G20 leaders later in the year. On behalf of India, the Ministry of Power and NTPC organised a seminar on CCUS, held as a parallel event to the G20 Energy Transitions Working Group on Sun...
In terms of overall outcomes, it was disappointing that the main achievement of this COP was to avoid backsliding on the Glasgow agreements, which means it did not really progress at all in most areas including mitigation. The cover decision, called the "Sharm El-Sheikk Implementation Plan" basically just repeats Glasgow's agreements on aiming to k...
This is meant to be themed as the 'Implementation' COP, following the Glasgow 'ambition' COP and the Paris 'Agreements' COP. It cannot be sensed at half-way whether this theme will be achieved. However this COP is also being called the 'African COP', and it is certainly achieving that, through the attendance by many from this continent, and the man...
UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the conference with strong words, including the warnings "Cooperate or perish", "failure to deliver on climate is a collective suicide pact", and that the world is "on the highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator". One anticipation towards this COP was around whether countries would...
This new acronym represented the combined annual Ministerial meetings of both the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM13) and Mission Innovation (MI-7) and took place from the 21 to 23 September. Over 5000 people attended in-person from around 32 countries. There was a very busy side-event programme with nineteen parallel events at any one time, totalling...
The first meeting of the newly-appointed Supervisory Body for Article 6.4 was just held, over 4 days from the 25th to the 28th July. This is a very important part of the Paris Agreement, as it will create a new mechanism for international cooperation based on projects and carbon credits. To quote the UNFCCC, "The Article 6.4 Mechanism is designed t...
The CSLF delegates meeting in Bergen got the pleasure of a site visit to the Northern Lights Receiving Terminal at Oygarden. This place will go down in CCS history as the first of its kind in the world, being able to receive and store CO2 from anywhere in the world. It was impressive to see the progress made as it is now in construction, compared w...
Arthur Lee, Chevron Fellow and Principal Advisor gives an overview of the key accomplishments of SB56 in Bonn, Germany. The road to COP27 Sharm El Sheik ran through the SB56 sessions at Bonn, the seat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It was a winding road with some issues that saw paths forward; some issu...
The 5th international workshop was held in New Orleans on 19-20th May, a very appropriate location given the growing interest in and vast potential for offshore storage in the Gulf of Mexico. With 50 attendees in-person and 120 virtually, there was a good mix of industry, researchers and regulators. In particular there was very good attendance by U...
The IPCC Working Group III issued its long-awaited report with a media event which had the poignant title above. Of the IPCC's trilogy of reports, this is the one that focusses on how to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The bad news is that in 2018 GHG emissions were higher than any time in human history. The slightly better news is that the ...
Our colleagues from the IEA produce extremely important information on CO2 emissions from the energy sector, and their latest update is very sobering. For all the massive behaviour change we saw due to COVID, CO2 emissions fell by only 5.2% in 2020, and then rebounded by 6% in 2021 to their highest level ever, to 36.3 Gt. This increase was due to e...
The University of Texas at Austin held its 6th conference on carbon capture and storage from 25th to 27th January, in a fully virtual format. This conference combined the research and other activities from the Gulf Coast Carbon Centre, the Texas Carbon Management Programme, the UT Energy Institute, and the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Eng...
Glasgow Climate Pact In the late hours of Saturday the 13th November the 197 countries at COP26 agreed on a new agreement to build upon the Paris Agreement, called the Glasgow Climate Pact. In this package of decisions there will be much detailed analysis by many to come, I provide a brief summary from my perspective here. From our mitigation...
There were significant side-events on CCS in the second week. The first was organised by the Global CCS Institute, on CCS in the Green Transition. On the panel was Guloren Turan of the Institute, Professor Jim Skea, IPCC Co-chair of WGIII, Ruth Herbert of CCSA, Jonas Helseth of Bellona, and myself. Guloren presented the Institute's recent Global St...
