To limit global warming to well below 2°C, countries must achieve net-zero emissions by around mid-century. The energy transition needed to achieve this goal presents a daunting task for most countries. To help inform the energy transition, IAMs have been used to identify the lowest-cost mitigation pathways for countries to achieve economy-wide, ne...

In modern power grids, a power plant with CO2 capture will be required to operate as a low-carbon, flexible, dispatchable power generator. With increased penetration of intermittent renewables, greater load-following is likely and a rise in the frequency of start-up/shutdown cycles would be expected. If it transpired that frequent start-up/shutdown...

One of the key barriers to the wide scale application of CCS is cost. Understanding the costs of CCS is essential to understand the role for and potential of CCS technology in addressing climate change, and for guidance in research activities aiming to reduce the cost and improve the performance of promising new CCS technologies in different applic...

With an installed capacity of around 200 GW, the China Huaneng Group (CHNG) is the largest power group in China and, in fact, in the world. Dr. Xu Shisen, who briefed attendees on some of China's extensive range of CCUS-related activities, past and present, is Chairman of CHNG's Clean Energy Research Institute. Dr. Xu began by reminding listeners o...

A strong panel, Chaired by EPRI's Abhoyjit Bhown, was brought together to discuss the status of PCC technologies. While most capture technologies at TRL8 or TRL9 are amines, there are several promising 2nd and 3rd generation technologies under development and attracting strong interest. For the purposes of this discussion, each of the panelists des...

The US DOE held its annual workshop on modelling carbon capture as two 2-hour sessions on consecutive days, 17-18 February 2021. This year, the focus was on modelling carbon capture in the industrial sector and, due to the pandemic, the workshop was held as a virtual event. The event was organised by Jae Edmunds (PNNL) and Danielle Koren (DOE), and...

Since its introduction, the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) has become ubiquitous in the evaluation and comparison of power generation technologies. While it is a readily accessible metric, it focuses exclusively on the cost of electricity produced from a given asset, or set of assets, and neglects to address the provision of ancillary service...

CCS technologies are essential for meeting global temperature targets. With power, as with the other sectors, the technologies have the ability to decarbonise but deployment rates are currently far 'off track'. To meet the targets required to mitigate temperature rises effectively, it is important to understand the specific role CCS technologies ca...

CCS has long been recognised as a key component of an effective mitigation strategy to decarbonise the power and industrial sectors. Commercial deployment of the technology, however, has been slow and must accelerate if it is to achieve its potential and contribute effectively to mitigating climate change. Accordingly, much effort has been focused ...

On the 9th July the IEA held a high-level Ministerial meeting to discuss accelerating the transition to clean energy in the context of COVID-19. This is a summary by IEAGHG staff. Opening plenary To avoid the sharp rebound in emissions that followed the 2009 global financial crisis, the IEA very quickly called for a sustainable economic recovery wi...

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released its Special Report on Clean Energy Innovation on 2 July. The report is the first publication (since 2017) in its revamped Energy Technology Perspectives (ETP) series, with the full ETP 2020 report slated for release in the autumn. ETP is one of the IEA's flagship publications, with the new face li...

Last week I attended the USDOE Workshop on Representing CCUS at College Park, Maryland, 9 – 11 March 2020. Organised by the US Department of Energy, this was the third workshop bringing energy modellers together with policymakers and economists, plus technology experts covering capture, utilisation and storage. Workshops are held eve...

Subtitled "The Role of CCUS in Enabling a Circular Economy", iCCUS 2020 was co-hosted by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Kingdom of Bahrain, represented by H.R.H. Abdulaziz Bin Salman Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Minister of Energy, and H.E. Shaikh Mohamed Bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, Minister of Oil, respectively.  Held over two days in Riyadh, Saud...

On Wednesday, 6 November, the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) hosted around 200 delegates at the CCUS 2019 conference in London. The one-day conference was the first of what is expected to be an annual event in the UK. In her welcoming remarks, Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke, CCSA President, apologised that, due to an important alter...

This report was prepared by the University College Cork and was managed on behalf of IEAGHG by Keith Burnard.  The USDOE's Office of Fossil Energy convened a workshop on 17-19 October 2018 in College Park, Maryland, USA, to provide a forum to review and exchange the latest understanding of carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) and to i...

Free to download now: https://ieaghg.org/networks/costs-network The sixth meeting of the CCS Cost Network Workshop was held on March 19-20, 2019 at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) headquarters in Palo Alto, California, under the auspices of the IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme. The purpose of the workshop is to share and discuss th...

Integrated assessment models (IAMs) quantify the interactions and trade-offs between societal demands for energy, economic, and environmental services, using a systems approach. These systems are typically the energy system, the economy, the earth-land system, the water system and atmospheric climate system, although every IAM does not necessarily ...

On 19-20 March, around 50 experts from 11 countries gathered at EPRI's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, to engage in issues relating to the cost of CCS. Following the tried and trusted format of earlier CCS Cost Network Workshops, there were five plenary sessions on selected topics relating to CCS and costs, each of 90 minutes duration. These...

On 29 November, in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, on the second day of the "Accelerating CCUS: A Global Conference to Progress CCUS" and the day following the UK-IEA International CCUS Summit, keynote addresses were given by Claire Perry, UK Minster of State for Energy and Clean Growth, and the IEA Executive Director, Fatih Birol. Minister Perry began ...

Jointly chaired by the IEAGHG's Tim Dixon and the International Knowledge Centre's Mike Monea, the panellists in this session discussed examples of shared learnings from operational large-scale CCS projects and reflected how these learnings could bring closer the construction of yet more CCS plants. On the panel were Corwyn Bruce and Beth Hardy to ...