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​ 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 pro...

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 CO 2 conversion; plus so...

  The effectiveness of CCS as a global solution to carbon emission abatement will depend on widespread deployment in both established industrialised and developing economies. One of the key stages for any country is the identification of a national CO 2 storage resource. To help understand the challenges faced by different countries that have ...

​ Review of CO 2 storage in basalts – new technical review from IEAGHG on the potential of using basalts and other magnesium rich rocks to store CO 2 . Conventional CO 2 storage relies on injection into a reservoir in sedimentary rock which has an impermeable caprock. It is also possible to trap CO 2 in igneous rock formations with high magnesium, ...

CO 2 storage has now been tested at a number of demonstration sites around the world, including some depleted oil and gas reservoirs. The use of depleted reservoirs can offer some advantages because the geological characteristics that are pertinent to CO 2 storage, such as the distribution of porosity and permeability, have been pre-determined. Alt...

​ I like to watch the weather in a morning on BBC news to start the day. These days we regularly get images of the flow of the jet stream and I have been amazed by how much it varies, wobbling around the upper region of the globe. This morning we were told that the jet stream was bringing high winds to the UK and planes coming from the USA will be ...

Andy Boston from the Energy Research Partnership in the UK has written a great article that presses on an issue that has concerned me for some time, the use of the levelised costs of electricity (LCOE) to compare low carbon technologies. In his article "the levelised cost of fruit" see http://erpuk.org/levelised-cost-fruit/ he dismisses the use of ...

​ A new report entitled The Arctic Resilience Report (see https://www.sei-international.org/publications?pid=3047 ) indicates that temperatures in the Arctic are currently about 200C above what would be expected for the time of year and that sea ice is at the lowest extent ever recorded for the time of year. One concern highlighted by the report is...

  This was a lively well attended panel discussion which certainly sparked a lot of debate. My takeaways from this were: CO 2 utilisation and conversion to chemicals is a hot topic in many countries, with many Governments funding research programmes To meet the below 2 0 C target set at COP22 we need mitigation options that permanently remove ...

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 CO 2 CRC to launch their r...

  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. S...

  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 tw...

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 gCO 2 /kWh by 2050 if we are to have a rea...

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 ...

One of the latest CCS projects to begin operating in the United States is the Kemper County Energy Facility in the state of Mississippi. Richard Espoito, the Geosciences, Carbon Utilization and Storage Southern Company, programme manager, presented an up-beat account at the start of the GHGHT-13 conference on Thursday. Richard stressed the modern '...

One of the themes covered by GHGT-13 in Lausanne is the potential of combining CCS and geothermal energy. There are different ways in which geothermal energy might be used. One idea is to inject CO 2 into a saline aquifer at one point and then extract heat energy from another location within the same aquifer. Doublet extraction and injection of coo...

Statoil have been operating at Sleipner since 1996 marking twenty years of injection monitoring at the site. The monitoring programme has been shown to be a success proving both conformance and containment as well as including contingency plans. Repeated seismic and gravimetric surveys have been conducted throughout the lifetime of the project alon...

  A total of 10 talks discussing trapping mechanisms for CO 2 were presented at GHGT-13 on Tuesday. This included new research from Stanford University (Charlotte Garing et al.) which demonstrated, through micro-CT imaging experiments, the residual trapping effects that occur at pore-scale within the reservoir (and the impact of capillary pres...

As part of the Risk Assessment session held at GHGT-13, Scott Frailey from the Illinois State Geological Survey spoke about the issues surrounding the variety of techniques currently used to calculate storage resource and their associated uncertainties. He announced that The Society of Petroleum Engineers CCS Technical Section is forming a multi‐so...