Prior to our ExCo meeting in Le Havre, ADEME organised a one day seminar entitled ‘Colloque International CSCV’. Juho lipponen from the IEA CCS unit in Paris had been invited to speak at this otherwise all French event. Juho, however, had to pull out at the last minute and graciously nominated me as stand in primarily as I was already there. The title of his talk was ‘The CCS Roadmap and what’s next?’ As I had been involved in the development of both the previous and the 2013 CCS Roadmap, I felt comfortable that I could give his talk justice.

Personally, I find road maps a little troublesome; as soon as they are printed they are largely out of date but they do seem to strike a chord with the policy community so I have to grudgingly accept they are of some value. The 2013 CCS Roadmap, despite my general scepticism, stands the test of time. It focuses one’s mind on what we need to achieve between 2013 and 2020 to lay the ground work to build global CCS deployment on. We need to get projects on the ground; 20 was the target and we are well on the way to achieving that. We need to get regulations and policy in place in countries that can to deploy CCS. And this has happened in North America, Europe and Australia. Industry CCS is needed as well as CCS in the power sector and that is happening in the USA, Europe, Canada, UAE and China. We need CCS in non OECD countries; again we see projects in Brazil, UAE and China and plans for projects in Mexico and Indonesia.

Overall I think we are achieving in the necessary timescale what the roadmap wanted us to. If we are behind in areas, it is on proving the geological resource base in regions of the world. We need to send a message to politicians to put more resources into storage site assessment and characterisation. Also, for regions of the world that do not have an established CO2-EOR industry and the storage resources are offshore, we need governments to bite the bullet and fund the pipeline infrastructure to enable the storage of CO2 in these offshore fields.

Then, after 2020 if we have set the base correctly, we can start the next phase of establishing hundreds of projects worldwide.