BLOG

​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...

I went to Portland Harbour to see the results of the harbour trials of the UK Energy Technologies Institute funded marine Monitoring Measurement and Verification (MMV) system which has been developed for CO2 storage site surveillance. This has a strong emphasis on the utilisation of AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles – now famous from "Boaty McBo...

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...

​Globally, the pulp and paper (P&P) industry is the fifth largest industrial source of CO2 emissions. Recently, the Paris Agreement has highlighted the target of achieving below 1.5oC temperature rise. In order to achieve this goal, bio-CCS has an important role to play to achieve this target. In a pulp mill, the CO2 emissions arise mainly from...

 It is pleasing to see that Ladybird Books (which publishes mass-market children's books) has published a title on Climate Change which has been co-authored by HRH the Prince of Wales. The book, Climate Change, provides a short-format guide to the key scientific facts central to climate change. It explains the history, dangers and challenges o...

​CO2 capture from natural gas (NG) can be done by several technologies, e.g. solvent scrubbing, membranes, adsorption or cryogenic processes. The future demand in NG might trigger development of NG fields with high CO2 partial pressure, for which pressure swing adsorption (PSA) processes could be more suitable than the other options. Besides, PSA p...

​Overall good progress is being made with the experience gained in both monitoring and modelling from demonstration and pilot projects. There is real progress in streamlining MMV at projects and reducing the costs of monitoring. Several sites have now demonstrated conformance of a modelling-monitoring loop, leading to an improvement in the understa...

​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...

 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 CO2 storage resource. To help understand the challenges faced by different countries that have ei...

​Review of CO2 storage in basalts – new technical review from IEAGHG on the potential of using basalts and other magnesium rich rocks to store CO2. Conventional CO2 storage relies on injection into a reservoir in sedimentary rock which has an impermeable caprock. It is also possible to trap CO2 in igneous rock formations with high magnesium, iron a...

CO2 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 CO2 storage, such as the distribution of porosity and permeability, have been pre-determined. Altho...

​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 s...

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 t...

 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...