IEAGHG Summer School 2019

The IEAGHG staff are back in the office after our annual week-long Summer School, this year hosted by the International CCS Knowledge Centre in Regina, Canada. This intensive 5 day event covered every aspect of CCS, from capture to storage and from health and safety to regulations and policy, giving a detailed overview to PhD students and early career professionals chosen to attend. IEAGHG were delighted to host the School with the Knowledge Centre again, following other successful Schools in Regina in 2016 and 2017. Mike Monea from the Knowledge Centre was one of the leaders in setting up the SaskPower Boundary Dam CCS Project, the world’s first fully integrated and full-chain CCS facility on a coal-fired power plant, and talks throughout the week used this project as an excellent case study for many of the topics.

Speakers from across the world visited the event to provide talks and mentoring to the 39 international students throughout the week, with 20 different countries represented by these students. On the Wednesday, the students and mentors were treated to a field trip to the BD3 project, with in-depth tours of the power plant, capture plant and CO₂ injection site (the Aquistore project, run by PTRC).

Throughout the week, students attended lectures, undertook evening group work and presented posters on their own research; it certainly was a busy week! Two best posters were selected; congratulations to the winner Viktor Stenberg (Chalmers University, Sweden) for his poster on ‘Cost-effective large scale hydrogen production with net negative CO₂ emissions’ and in second place, Martijn van de Sande (from the Dutch Enterprise Agency, RVO, The Netherlands) for his poster on the ‘Design of the Dutch CCS deployment stimulus’.

The group work done throughout the School culminated in presentations on the final day, where groups demonstrated a range of talents (including songs and interpretive dance!) to educate the audience on their particular topics, before being questioned about their subject area by a panel of experts. The winning group at this year’s School tackled the topic of whether CCS has a role in the issue of ‘unburnable carbon’, giving an insightful, intelligent and somewhat comedic look into the issue. Congratulations again to the group, and thank you for your rousing rendition of ‘Let It Be’!

A big congratulations to Mennat Allah Labib (the University of Edinburgh, UK) and Abdul`Aziz Aliyu (the University of Sheffield, UK) for winning the ‘Most Outstanding Students’ award, sponsored by PTRC and the Knowledge Centre. Based on observations throughout the week, these two were selected as the winners and won a cash prize along with the offer of an internship opportunity at the Knowledge Centre in Regina.

Finally, a huge thanks from IEAGHG to the Knowledge Centre for hosting such a wonderful and well-organised event, to the mentors and speakers who gave their time to contribute to the learnings throughout the week, to SaskPower for hosting us at Boundary Dam for our field trip, and to the students whose enthusiasm, hard work and passion for CCS made this week one to remember!

For more information about the IEAGHG Summer School Series, visit https://ieaghg.org/summer-school, or contact myself at sam.neades@ieaghg.org