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 organised such a workshop on 7 June during the Asia Clean Energy Forum 2018 conference hosted at ADB, Manila. The overall conference was well attended, with around 1000 delegates, covering all low carbon energy technologies. Opening the CCUS CoE workshop, ADB's David Elzinga said "CCS is an important technology at ADB".
Of specific note was the update provided by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) on CCUS R&D in India. IIT have ongoing research and development in CCUS, working with NTPC and others towards a pilot capture plant, and it was nice to see reference to the Indian storage atlas from the 2008 IEAGHG report. But the news that struck me most was that the Indian government will be releasing their own roadmap report on CCUS soon. With ADB showing more interest in supporting CCUS in India, we await that government roadmap with great interest.
Also of great interest was the work by ITB and by LEMIGAS in Indonesia, presented by ITB focussing on the the Gundih project and the challenges they have overcome there to make progress. It was nice to hear that much of the work is intended to be published in the IJGGC.
Updates were also provided by the Shanghai CoE, and the Guandong CoE, and by the South African Centre SANEDI, including planned work by Shangahi CoE on capture readiness for power plant and on industrial plant.
In giving feedback at the end, I made a general point that these CoEs have an important role to be informing their national governments on the role of CCUS for their national mitigation plans when they update their NDCs (Nationally Determined Contributions) for the UNFCCC's Paris Agreement. It was good to see that the Indonesia CoE already has this intention.
The workshop concluded with an offer from the International CCS Knowledge Centre to bring together CoEs on an annual basis to share experiences and best practices, with support from IEAGHG, which seemed popular. The suggested title by the Knowledge Centre for these meetings as CCS ICE (CCS International Centres of Excellence).
ADB Deep Dive Workshop on CCUS
I was invited to participate in an ADB 'Deep Dive' workshop on CCUS on 8 June. The objectives of the CCUS workshop were to understand recent developments from practitioners and to open a dialogue between stakeholders in Asia to promote CCUS.
Presentations ranged from donor countries activities to developments in developing countries. Updates were given on the UK and US policies on CCUS. Of particular interest was the work in Indonesia presented by LEMIGAS on their pilot EOR project. They have now completed a test injection of 50-100 tpd and plan to scale up to 500-1000 tpd. The CO2 will be supplied from their gas handling facility where it has to be removed from the produced gas.
Also of note is work in India that NTPC are doing, looking at a range of capture technologies including absorbtion, adsorption, membrane and algae, at various locations in India. This work is driven by NETRA, the research centre of NTPC.
The Global CCS Institute gave a good review on CCS work in the steel sector across Asia. They also observed that CCS is not generally regarded as a 'cool' technology, unlike for example Tesla.
A very interesting review of lessons learnt from Petra Nova was given by JX Nippon, including practical aspects such as allowing more time for commissioning FOAK plant, having a robust spare parts programme, and the importance of oilfield monitoring and management (noting that oil production has increased by 2000%). This largest CCUS project in the world has a sophisticated business model which includes Japanese investment and is greatly assisted by US DOE funding and Texas tax breaks.
The International CCS Knowledge Centre showed how learnings from the Boundary Dam project need to be applied to CCS for the cement industry, and learnings from Canadian policies. Carbon Clean Solutions of the UK highlighted their several pilot capture projects, including one in India.
I presented an update on the IEAGHG's technical programme aspects of most relevance to ADB and its CCUS-active countries, such as the CCS Summer School and our reports on capture ready, on developing a test injection project, and on starting storage capacity assessment. I participated in two panels to give reflections on the ways forward for Asian countries from a global perspective. In terms of accelerating CCUS in Asia, the ADB is already doing great work and expanding its countries on CCUS, thanks to Australia and the UK for being the donor countries to their CCS Trust Fund. To answer the question given to me on how to stimulate more knowledge exchange in the next six months, I highlighted that much will take place of course at GHGT-14 in October, and we hope that many of the Asian CCUS experts and stakeholders will attend. We plan to have a Discussion Panel there to highlight and discuss the work of ADB and the World Bank, and I also look forward to seeing the ADB-supported work being presented in the GHGT-14 technical sessions.
To conclude, thank you ADB and UK BEIS, it was a pleasure to participate in these two CCUS workshops in ACEF and it was good to learn of new developments in the region. Takehiko Nakao, the President of ADB, said in the ACEF concluding plenary "we need innovative clean energy technologies…including CCS to transform the energy sector".It was good to see ADB including CCUS in ACEF with the other low carbon technologies needed for this transformation.
