Joining the inaugural World CCUS Conference

The beautiful city of Bergen, Norway was the location for the first WCCUS conference held 1^st-4^th September. The conference brought together around 300 CCUS professionals and included field trips, workshops, a young professionals programme, keynote talks, technical sessions and posters. Technical sessions covered a range of topics including: CO₂ Containment and Trapping Mechanisms; Capture Technologies; CCS Society; Mineralisation and Other Storage; Application of AI Technology and other topics. The conference dinner was held at the Fløirestauranten which, when the weather allowed, showcased a beautiful panoramic view of the city.

Northern Lights Project Visit:

Seeing the Northern Lights Project first hand, with the Northern Pioneer ship docked, just one week after the first injection into the Aurora reservoir, was a real highlight of the conference for me. We got to see up close the different rock formations that are used in the Aurora reservoir, ensuring the CO₂ is safely stored, as well as the CO₂ storage containers that are the temporary storage for the incoming CO₂ from the ships, before this is transported by pipeline to the reservoir. It highlighted the importance of collaboration and industries working together to achieve this.

Plenary talks:

The conference opened with a positive keynote talk from Professor Philip Ringrose, NTNU, giving an overview of the on overview of the Global CCS picture and how it’s going, this was followed by an update of the current landscape and future direction of CCUS by Andreas Jagtoyen, Equinor ASA. Both mornings also had interesting plenary panel discussions discussing ‘Large-Scale CCUS Projects: Global Landscape, Lessons and Insights’ and ‘CCUS Developments in Different Regions’.

CCS Society session:

I had the pleasure of chairing the CCS Society session alongside Eva Halland, CarbonGeo. During this session we heard from Jacob Ladenburg who presented on ‘The preference and acceptance of CCS’ and gave us an overview of the current public acceptability in Denmark; yvind Koldal presenting ‘Guidance on Subsea Barrier and Isolation Philosophy for Carbon Capture and Storage systems’ and raising the question are we overengineering the system where efficiencies could be made to reduce costs?; Peipei Chen presenting on ‘Exploring the economic scalability of European CCUS clusters’; and Ingvild Ombudstvedt who presented ‘The value of standardisation in CCUS’ and discussed the collaborative work that is taking place in this space from a legal perspective.

It was a great opportunity to both attend the conference and to have been part of the Executive Committee shaping the event and the technical programme, thank you to EAGE for organising an engaging few days in Bergen.