The Global CCS Institute’s New Junior Professional CCS Network
In September 2013, GCCSI established a Junior Professional CCS Network aimed at junior professionals, recent graduates and students from all areas of the CCS chain. Linking through an online network, focus areas of the Network will be to provide learning and relationship opportunities for members.
An extranet platform has been created to facilitate the Network and will be a forum to:
• connect with other junior CCS professionals
• post articles or discussion pieces
• provide information on upcoming conferences, workshops or training
• deliver expert webinars, including webinars from members of the Network and
• arrange face-to-face or online meetings.
The Network is also an opportunity to help facilitate questions junior professionals may have about CCS and to connect them with CCS experts. Content will mainly be driven by members and facilitated by the Institute. Upcoming activities include webinars reporting on the Global Status of CCS: 2013, a report released annually by the Institute and on the proceedings of the 19th Conference of Parties held in Warsaw, Poland during November. In December a member of the Network will present on his PhD thesis looking at the politics of CCS.
To get things kicked off within the Network, a Junior Professional Legal and Regulatory Tutorial Group was set up, made up of 20promising young professionals (chosen from around 190 applicants). The theme of this first course, which lasted four weeks, was ‘Good Models for CCS Legislation: Advancing CCS Projects within Frameworks’, and lead by two leading experts in regulatory issues – Craig Hart (Renmin University of China's School of Environment and Natural Resources) and Pamela Tomski (Global CCS Institute and Research Experience in Carbon Sequestration (RECS) programme). Different guest lecturers gave a talk each which, which was followed by a tutorial immediately after – all done live, via webinar facilities. All speakers gave interesting talks on region-specific regulatory, financial and legal issues – Ian Havercroft (Global CCS Institute) spoke about the EU CCS Directive, Colin Harvey (Department of Mines and Petroleum, Western Australia Government) looked at CCS in Western Australia, Laura Miller (Summit Power Group) talked on the Texas Clean Energy Project and Kipp Coddington (Kazmarek Mowrey Cloud Laseter LLP) explained negotiating anthropogenic CO2 offtake contracts. You can find the lecture and tutorial recordings here: http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/get-involved/in-focus/2013/05/junior-professional-legal-and-regulatory-tutorial-group
A huge amount of discussion then took place between tutors, speakers and young professionals via an interactive tutorial site. Between the talks, all participants were encouraged to read course material, post discussion topics on the forum pages and generally partake in topic-related conversations – some really interesting thoughts came up throughout the month that the course was active!
Following this course, the Group has now been opened to all students and junior professionals working in areas related to CCS, expanding out of the legal/regulatory space and hopefully creating a large and dynamic network for all to contribute to and benefit from.
For more information on the Junior Professional CCS Network, please see http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/institute/news/new-junior-professional-ccs-network or contact Jessica Morton at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
If any organisations or individuals themselves are interested in running a webinar for the network, please contact Jessica to discuss.