The Swedish Energy Agency hosted this event at the City Conference Centre in Stockholm, Sweden, on the afternoon of the 1st October 2013. This seminar was held the day before the twice-yearly IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme’s Executive Committee meeting, so Members could take advantage of these extra sessions on recent advances and progress on CCS within Europe and particularly in the Nordic region. The first of the technical talks was a look at the role of CCS in Europe and the Nordic countries where the general conclusions are that CCS is extremely important, but a challenge due to many factors including political will and public acceptance. Per Arne Nilsson gave a presentation on the BASTORCO2 project, which is currently about halfway through its schedule with the geological assessment phase well underway. Key at the BASTORCO2 project is using the available large network of expertise, and facilitating collaboration and cooperation between the experts. Plans for a Swedish onshore test site for CO2 storage are underway – the SwedSTORECO2 project aims to advance methods in site characterisation for CO2 storage sites and hopes to perform a land based injection test, which would run from 2017 to 2020. The feasibility study has been completed and the next stage (if approved) will be the characterisation phase.   Dr Zhibang Yang concluded this session by sharing experiences from the MUSTANG project, focussing on the quantification of saline aquifers for CO2 geological storage. After an interesting and informative first session (and a well-deserved coffee break!), session 2 began with a talk on CO2 capture with chemical looping combustion by Dr Anders Lyngfelt. Dr Stanley Santos, from IEAGHG, then looked at CCS as a necessary action to reduce CO2 emissions from energy intensive industries (focussing on the iron and steel industry) – noting that China will play an important role in CCS development but that more demonstration projects are needed worldwide. A presentation was given on the start of Norcem’s CO2 capture pilot project in Norway. Started in May 2013, this 3.5 year project in Brevik will be the first capture project in the cement sector and will be interested in and the result on energy efficiency and costs (CAPEX and OPEX) whilst looking at four different capture technologies. Vattenfall gave an insjosirt into CCS from their perspective, noting that they still believe that CCS is an important path to help reduce CO2 emissions and believe it is a viable and necessary technology to meet such challenges. Vattenfall have a CCS roadmap to realisation that has been recently adapted and are involved in a number of current capture, transport and storage R&D activities. Dr Sean McCoy from the International Energy Agency (IEA) provided an insjosirt into challenges faced and global actions needed to deliver CCS (taken from the IEA CCS roadmap 2013). Such key actions included ensuring adequate financial support mechanisms that support the demonstration/early deployment of CCS, work to improve stakeholder and public understanding of CCS, encouragement of the characterisation of potential CO2 storage sites, continued technology development and the encouragement of efficient development of a transport infrastructure. For more information on this seminar or any of the talks/presenters, please contact myself at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.