IPIECA workshop – “Making CCS Fly”

​IPIECA is the global oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues. They held a workshop on CCS on the 12^th September at BP in London, bringing in a range of stakeholders to identity the key roles and actions to speed up CCS. Sessions covered costs and technical issues, policies and public issues, regional perspectives, business models, and the role for IPIECA. It was well attended, with many oil and gas company representatives as you would expect, and others from organisations such as US DOE, MIT, Oxford University, CCSA, IEA, IEAGHG, The International CCS Knowledge Centre and GCCSI.

In the many interesting presentations, responses and discussions, one to note in the business models session was from NRG on their Petra Nova project which became operational earlier this year. This large-scale CCS project on a coal power station has reached 800,000 tonnes captured and sent to use and storage in CO₂-EOR. I was struck by what appears to be a more complex business structure compared to other CCS projects, with multiple companies and joint-ventures involved, including the export credit agency of Japan and a JV company set up by NRG and Hilcorp to run the pipeline and EOR aspects.

Also to note was the presentation by Myles Allen of Oxford University, highlighting that carbon price alone is very unlikely to stimulate CCS deployment, even with the modellers' forecasts of higher prices, prices which also seem unlikely in the medium term, and so instead he was proposing some form of mandatory CCS mechanism.

IEAGHG was asked to respond on costs and technical issues, and made points on the need for large-scale demonstrations to reduce costs for subsequent projects by learning-by-doing and sharing experiences, the need to progress storage assessments, the refining of MMV strategies at larger injection projects, the challenges facing BioCCS, and the opportunities with offshore CCS and with CCS's role in flexible power generation.

So an interesting meeting, running the day before the IEAGHG Costs Network meeting which is also in London (Imperial College), which helped those attendees who were attending both.