Mission Innovation Carbon Capture Challenge

The report of the experts workshop was launched yesterday in conjunction with a high level round-table at the Ministerial meeting of Mission Innovation in Malmo, Sweden. This substantial report (nearly 300 pages) sets out thirty ‘priority research directions’ for advancing the performance and reducing the costs of CO₂ capture, utilisation and storage, focussing on low technology readiness levels (TRL). I recommend its use to guide low-TRL research activities. IEAGHG provided two experts to this workshop. See https://www.energy.gov/fe/articles/doe-releases-report-mission-innovation-ccus-experts-workshop and IEAGHG blog on the workshop of 2 October 2017.

The roundtable at the Ministerial in Malmo was focussed on stimulating public-private partnerships to take-forward innovation drawing upon these priority research directions. The twelve participants were half government and half industry. They included Dan Brouillette, Deputy Secretary US Department of Energy, Steve Winberg, Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy, Terjes Soviknes, Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Norway, Khalid Abuleif, Saudi Arabia, Kim Rudd of NRCan, Rob Little of OGCI and Shell, Yoshihiro Shiraiwa of MHI, and myself for IEAGHG. The discussions were under Chatham House rules and covered mechanisms for public-private partnerships to accelerate innovation. Many good points were made, including learning from the examples of best practice that already exist in the CCUS area, such as ourselves and others, and encouraging expansion of these to bring in more countries, especially developing countries. Gaining even more benefit from the large-scale projects by allowing innovation developments to be based around them was also suggested, as well as the knowledge sharing that currently exists from some of these projects. The concluding statement released was “governments and industry discussed how to work together to coordinate CCUS R&D, achieving lower costs and more efficient CCUS technologies”. I found the roundtable an interesting opportunity for such discussions.

Other roundtables were held on hydrogen, energy storage, and heating and cooling. For more information see http://mission-innovation.net/mi-3/ .