It was a privilege to be invited to present to the first Pan-Commonwealth Sustainable Energy Forum, organised by the Commonwealth Secretariat in London. The Commonwealth is a voluntary association of 53 independent and equal sovereign states, which are home to 2.4 billion people and includes both advanced economies and developing countries. 31 of t...

  You are all familiar with the Keeling Curve of CO 2 measurements in the atmosphere. Well when Ralph Keeling comes to town you want to meet him. Ralph is the son of Charles Keeling, who started the measurements in 1958 and who the graph is named after. Ralph continues his father's work. He is a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanogr...

The CSLF Technical Group meeting was held in conjunction with the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consortium (MGSC) Science Conference at Champaign, Illinois, in the last week of April. Good updates on CCS projects were provided in both, with a focus on activities in the USA not surprisingly. Of particular interest (to me at least) were some updat...

The STEMM-CCS project held its third annual meeting last week. This is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project that is developing environmental monitoring to test in-situ at a controlled release of CO 2 in the seabed at the Goldeneye location in the North Sea (see IEAGHG 2017-IP14). The project is coordinated by the UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC...

  Japan has the Presidency of the G20 this year, hosting the G20 meeting on 28-29 June in Osaka. They are interested in potentially including an agreement at G20 on CCUS. RITE organised a workshop jointly with C2ES to generate ideas and identify best practices focussed in three CCUS areas: policies; finance; and international collaboration and...

The two US projects in the Gulf of Mexico held their first Annual Meeting in Beaumont, Texas, on 11-12 February. The GomCarb project is led by BEG at the University of Texas covering the western Gulf of Mexico, and theSECARB Offshore project is led by the Southern States Energy Board covering eastern Gulf of Mexico, both quite large consortia partn...

A CCS Technical Workshop on the theme of risk assessment of geological storage was held in Tokyo on the 16 January. It was organised by the Geological CO 2 Storage Technology Research Association (a relatively new research association) with METI, NEDO and RITE. Introductions and scene-setting for CCS in Japan were provided by senior representatives...

IEAGHG was lead organiser of the only UNFCCC Side-event at COP24 on CCS, in collaboration with the University of Texas, International CCS Knowledge Centre, Bellona and CCSA. Held on the 6th December, the event was titled " Can Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) decarbonise industry in developed and developing countries? ". Being the only UNFCCC Side-...

COP24 is starting in Katowice, Poland. The pre-set objectives for this COP are to agree and finalise the Paris Agreement Work Programme (PAWP), also referred to as the 'Rulebook' for the Paris Agreement, these are the governance and frameworks to allow all elements to be implemented from 2020. In addition at this COP, there will be a stocktake of t...

It is the 40th meeting of the London Convention and the 13 th meeting of the London Protocol this week, the global treaties that protect the marine environment. The detailed work on transboundary CCS was completed in 2012 (see IEAGHG 2013-IP26 and 2014-IP19) but outstanding is the ratification of the 2009 amendment for CO 2 export which would remov...

After GHGT-14 I had the opportunity to visit the storage area of CTSCo's proposed CCS project. The Glenhaven proposed CO 2 test injection site near the town of Wandoan, approximately 400km north west of Brisbane, Queensland. The CO 2 injection at Glenhaven is proposed to take place in the deep precipice sandstone formation around 1.2km underground....

I participated in the BHP CCUS Partners Discussions workshop the day after GHGT-14. This brought together around 50 senior thought-leaders and experts in CCUS to brainstorm on BHP's future vision and objectives. Scene-setting talks were provided. A global update was given by Brad Page and Alex Zapantis of GCCSI. The workshop heard about a supportiv...

This Panel Discussion was organised by Brendan Beck, World Bank consultant, and chaired by Brian Allison of UK BEIS. The session had updates from donors and funding agencies such as the UK, Eva Halland of Norway and Natalia Kulichenko-Lotz of the World Bank, and heard from funded project activities in developing countries. Usman Pasarai of LEMIGAS ...

Bringing techniques and expertise from other disciplines to bear on a new area of application can be important to making step-change advancements in any area, and a recent example was provided at NETL "Mastering the Subsurface" Meeting in Pittsburgh (13-16 Aug 2018). A panel session (with presentations) was devoted to the results of a recent worksh...

It can be wonderful when things coincide to a synergistic benefit. I witnessed two examples this week, one of a practical convenience, the other of game-changing significance. The two annual review meetings of the US DOE's R,D&D programs in CO 2 capture and storage were running in parallel this year in Pittsburgh, enabling attendees to attend p...

Gosh how quickly a week can go by when you are deeply engaged in receiving a lot of information. Well that was how our Summer School felt to us. We were very pleased to have our 12 th International CCS Summer School hosted by the Norwegian CCS Research Centre in Trondheim, with 58 students from 24 countries. Covering all aspects of CCS presented by...

​ ADB Centres of Excellence Workshop ​ An excellent idea, get some of the growing number of CCUS Centres of Excellence (CoE) around the world together to share strengths, best practices, and expertise. This was the idea of the Asian Development Bank who are funding several Centres of Excellence in the Asian region, and supported by UK BEIS they org...

Yesterday in Copenhagen saw the launch of a new initiative under the Clean Energy Ministerial (CEM) on Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS). To mark the launch, a Side-event was held. This brought together governments and industry to discuss strategic public-private partnerships to encourage deployment of CCUS. Terje Soviknes, Minister of...

The report of the experts workshop was launched yesterday in conjunction with a high level round-table at the Ministerial meeting of Mission Innovation in Malmo, Sweden. This substantial report (nearly 300 pages) sets out thirty 'priority research directions' for advancing the performance and reducing the costs of CO 2 capture, utilisation and stor...

The 3 rd International Workshop on Offshore CCS took place on 3-4 May, organised by the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) in collaboration with IEAGHG and others, and hosted by the Research Council of Norway in Oslo, with support from SANEDI and CSLF. The aim of the workshop series is to facilitate sharing of knowledge and experiences among those wh...