The US DOE held its annual Carbon Storage Review meeting in Pittsburgh 1-3 August. This is always an interesting meeting because all the CCUS R,D&D projects funded by the US DOE have to present and be reviewed, and was attended by some 250 participants. This year was even more interesting because of the sixteen CarbonSAFE integrated proje...
Secure retention of CO2 in offshore storage sites will depend on reliable measuring, monitoring and verification (MMV) to ensure that any unplanned releases can be detected. The marine environment also needs to be characterised so that potential changes caused by a release of CO2 can be distinguished from natural variability. The Energy Techn...
Last week I was lucky enough to visit my first ever CCS site whilst attending the IEAGHG Summer School. SaskPower hosted the students for a day at Boundary Dam which included a visit to the Shand testing facilities and Aquistore storage site. For me this trip was a particular highlight of the week as I was able to finally see all the research...
The 2nd international workshop on offshore CCS was held in Beaumont Texas, 19-20 June. This was hosted by Lamar University and the BEG, and attracted 50 attendees from 9 countries to discuss developments for offshore transport and geological storage. It build on the conclusions and recommendations from the first workshop in 2016, continued the the...
The 12th Monitoring Network meeting concluded on Thursday 15 June after three days of the latest updates on monitoring technology developments and applications, healthy discussions, a group exercise, and a field trip to the MRCSP project. Many thanks to Battelle and Core Energy for hosting the meeting. It was so clear how monitoring has advanced an...
I attended the TCCS-9 conference by NCCS – International CCS Research Centre under auspices of NTNU and SINTEF. This conference takes place every two years since 2003 and run for two days in Trondheim. A total of 115 presentations and 10 keynotes were delivered, and topics covered carbon capture, transport, storage and utilization. Cross-cutting is...
Following our 51st Executive Committee meeting of IEAGHG members in Edmonton, Alberta, Shell invited attendees to visit the Shell Canada Quest CCS Project. This was a great opportunity to visit this large-scale CCS demonstration plant now in operation, and, with the SaskPower's Boundary Dam 3 CCS project, one of two major CCS projects located in Ca...
I attended a workshop by the Climate Technology Centre and Network (CTCN) at their headquarters in Copenhagen 22-23 May. CTCN was established as the operational arm of the UNFCCC's 'Technology Mechanism' and has been given increased emphasis by the Paris Agreement. IEAGHG was one of the earlier members of the CTCN's Network and have undertaken a f...
Last week I was fortunate enough to be able to attend CO2GeoNet's Forum, this year with the encouraging focus of 'Driving CCS towards Implementation'. CO2GeoNet is a European Network body that currently comprises 26 research institutes from 19 European countries, and brings together over 300 researchers with the multidisciplinary expertise needed ...
The 51st bi-annual IEAGHG ExCo meeting has come to a close in the exciting Canadian city of Edmonton. The two day IEAGHG Executive Committee meeting began on Tuesday 9th May and was held in the wonderful Westin hotel, Edmonton. This regular meeting is held twice yearly, at different locations across the world each time, and gives IEAGHG an op...
The STEMM-CCS project held its first annual meeting last week. This is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project that will develop and test environmental monitoring at a controlled release of CO2 in the North Sea. The project is coordinated by The UK's National Oceanography Centre, with a consortium of partners representing the leading marine science organ...
The Early Career Researcher Winter School held at the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training took place last week and with thanks to the UKCCSRC I was able to attend. It was a busy week with 7 keynote speakers covering topics including geological storage, the current status of CCS both internationally and in the UK, the economics and financing of proj...
The 7th Korea CCUS conference was held on Jeju island on 8-10th February. This annual conference brings together all the CCUS R&D in Korea. This is a respectably-sized conference, a total number of around 300 attended over the three days to hear presentations (in English) in three parallel streams: capture; storage; and CO2 conversion; plus som...
This was a lively well attended panel discussion which certainly sparked a lot of debate. My takeaways from this were: CO2 utilisation and conversion to chemicals is a hot topic in many countries, with many Governments funding research programmesTo meet the below 20C target set at COP22 we need mitigation options that permanently remove CO2 f...
As GHGT-13 drew so many from the CCS world together in one place for a week it is not surprising that many take advantage to organise launch events there. Two involved the launch of projects' datasets for wider use by the CCS community, one deep-focussed, one shallow-focussed. One was organised by Geoscience Australia and CO2CRC to launch their rel...
A Discussion Panel was organised to celebrate the 20 years of successful injection by Statoil at Sleipner, and how best to transfer knowledge globally. Statoil have been doing a good job over the years of sharing their seismic data (via IEAGHG) and other monitoring results at IEAGHG and other meetings, with very many papers published also. So...
USDOE's John Litynski chaired an absorbing session on "Large-Scale Carbon Capture Pilots" that certainly seemed to strike a chord. Several speakers provided the audience with the benefit of their extensive practical experience of managing or operating capture pilots at the 10+ MWe scale. They described how testing often progressed through two...
In his keynote speech, "Too late for 2°C?", Thomas Stocker, eminent environmental scientist from the University of Bern, made the very clear case for urgent action if the most damaging effects of climate change were to be averted. The IEA projects that we must aim for power sector emissions of less than 40 gCO2/kWh by 2050 if we are to have a reaso...
At the Site Characterisation session of GHGT-13, Nick Hoffman demonstrated how the CarbonNet project managed to design their plume mapping approach to successfully meet regulatory requirements. A prediction of plume paths with more than a 10% probability of occurrence are required by Australian GHG storage regulations. The probabilistic modelling a...
The GHGT-13 Student Reception, sponsored by G.E, was held last night, Wednesday 16th November, and began with a welcome from Sian Twinning (IEAGHG). Sian emphasised how beneficial the reception is to all attendees, as it enables students to meet and discuss what they have heard and learnt at GHGT-13 with their peers. It also allows then to connect ...
