I once again represented IEAGHG at the Global CCUS Summit held annually in China. The latest in the series was held in Beijing in October 2013. I was invited to present an opening keynote by the organisers and the title of my talk was: Comparing and Contrasting CCS Developments in Europe and USA.  My overview presentation, which I updated from the latest material sent by our members at the USDOE and some from the IEA CCS unit went down well.

I was also invited to participate in the first panel session of the conference, which discussed ‘Gas Power and CO2 Capture Technology’‘, chaired by Ming Sung of the Asia Pacific Clean Air Task Force. I gave a short presentation at this panel on the ‘Projected Trends in Gas Use in Power Generation’.   From my observations of the discussions that followed the panel, the message on the possible role of gas in power generation going forward seems to be registering a lot of  interest in China. A poll taken of the delegates attending the event confirmed their expectation of shale gas playing a bigger role (more than two thirds thought so) going forth. I did note in my panel presentation that China's current and near term infrastructure will also mean quite a lot of CCS on coal (the IEA CCS roadmap findings).

On the second day I chaired a panel session and gave the third presentation on 'Narrowing the gap of commercialising CO2 capture at the power plant" just to kick off the discussion at the panel session. This panel on the second day unfortunately only caught half the delegates due to the running of two parallel streams on capture and storage.  The session before the panel also included a paper by Luca Mancuso of Foster Wheeler Italia presenting draft results from a study they are doing for IEAGHG on baseline costs for coal fired power plants with CCS.

Overall, the conference was a success and well organised by the team lead by Ronnie Tian and Lejosir Yang from Asia Carbon Energy. However, the conference itself was down on numbers compared to previous years and also low in attendance and papers from big Chinese industrial players with the exception of Huaneng and Sinopec. However, there was a relatively good cross section of papers presented by industry and academia from North America.