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 'Unburnable carbon' refers to fossil fuel reserves that cannot be used and the resulting greenhouse gases emitted if the world has a limited 'carbon budget'. This situation leads to the question: what role does technology have in addressing these concepts and concerns related to them? The International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Intergovernm...

 The launch event of this report by the Sustainable Gas Institute (SGI) was held at Imperial College London on the 17th of May. The lead author, Sara Budinis, gave a presentation summarising the work, followed by a panel discussion with experts (Luke Warren (CCSA), Professor Paul Ekins (UCL), Charlotte Wolff-Bye (Statoil)) and the audience. Th...

 The 49th bi-annual IEAGHG ExCo meeting has come to a close in the beautiful Norweigen city of Bergen. Hosted by Gassnova, the meeting began on the 10th May with a visit to the Technology Centre Mongstad. This centre is the world's largest facility for testing and improving CO2 capture. Knowledge gained will prepare the ground for CO2 capture ...

 With thanks to the Gulf Coast Carbon Center for this article The Gulf Coast Carbon Center was delighted to host the first International Workshop on Offshore Geologic CO2 Storage. GCCC's Katherine Romanak was instrumental in organizing the workshop with IEAGHG's Tim Dixon, who is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at BEG. Dixon empha...

As we all know plastics are a man-made creation which like steel and cement are the building blocks of our current society. However plastics particularly packing is used only once then discarded causing significant environmental problems. The adverse impacts of discarded plastic in the oceans is well documented. Plastic manufacture uses 6% of globa...

 The world of offshore CCS gathered together over the 19-21 April 2016 at the Bureau of Economic Geology (BEG) at The University of Texas, Austin, Texas, for a workshop on offshore geological storage of CO2. The workshop was organized by the Gulf Coast Carbon Centre at BEG, IEAGHG, and the South African National Energy Development Institute, a...

 A study recently completed for the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) has just been published. This review was undertaken by the CO2 Storage team of the British Geological Survey (BGS) on behalf of UK Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Korean Clean Energy Ministry who jointly funded the work. The project was managed by ...

 I was honoured to be invited to give the opening keynote at the UKCCSRC Biannual Meeting in Manchester on 13 April (talking on COP-21 and CCS). It was especially rewarding to see the UKCCSRC's Call 1 and Call 2 projects now producing results and I was sorry to only be able to attend the first day. Howard Hertzog presented a plenary talk revie...

 It seems to be well documented scientific fact that the Artic is warming much more rapidly than the global average. See: http://www.carbonbrief.org/cuts-in-europes-air-pollution-have-boosted-arctic-warming.This is a phenomenon known as Arctic amplification. The main cause of the warming is considered to be the loss of sea ice in the region. A...

Coming on the back of NOAA news recently of 2015 being the hottest year on record and January and February 2016 being consecutively the hottest months on record so far it is not surprising to see that scientists from the International Arctic Research Centre have reported sea ice levels are at an all-time low. Apparently sea ice cover on 24 March 20...

 The World Bank recently published its latest report in the series; Turn Down the Heat: Confronting the New Climate Normal which makes for grim reading.  This latest report focuses on the risks of climate change to development in Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and parts of Europe and Central Asia. It lo...

 The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA have shown us that the Earth's 2015 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record keeping began in 1880. Not only that, but the record-breaking year continues a long-term warming trend, 15 of the 16 warmest years on record have now occurred since 2001. This visual...

The ink has now dried on the Paris Accord and plans embodied in the INDC's need to begin to be implemented. However, the road ahead for implementation may not be that straight forward, as recent developments with three of the largest global emitters suggest. In the USA one of the key components of their plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in t...

 I was invited to participate at the University of Texas's UTCCS3 event last week as I am working with them on the offshore storage workshop. UTCCS is a biannual conference where three research programmes on CCS come together to hold their programme reviews with their sponsors, presenting the current research work and results. The programmes a...

If ever we needed proof that the CCS Community are a hardy bunch, this seems to have come in the shape of the 1,017 abstracts submitted to the GHGT-13 conference. Despite the news late last year of the cancellation of the UK competition which could potentially have seen many hang up their hats, it seems the technical community has become used the t...

Norway is focusing on CCS applications in industry, with three pre-feasibility studies underway on CCS projects at a fertiliser plant, a waste to energy plant and at an ammonia fertiliser plant. Whilst it may be that Norway only chooses one project to proceed to demonstration, all three represent unique opportunities that will add to the portfolio ...