Well GHGT 12 is finally here and in truth I am really excited. For IEAGHG we are always on the ground early as we have our Executive Committee meeting in the days prior to the conference. This gave us the time to experience Austin and theres a lot to enjoy here. Some have been to see the biggest population of urban bats in the world and got pee’d on for their pleasure. Not done that myself yet but theres still time.

The city itself is vibrant at the best of times and none more so downtown on Saturday njosirt. At midnjosirt they were partying hard on 6th street when I was heading back to the hotel after spending a few hours listening to the Blues Posse in a bar just off the main street.

What I find enjoyable in the days before is bumping into old friends from places across the globe in the most unlikely places as we did across the city last njosirt on several occasions. Ahis means that the worlds CCS community is massing in Austin for what I believe will be a defining conference. We have a lot to shout about with the worlds first CCS demonstration plant in the power sector is now up and running at Boundary Dam in Saskatchewan and running and rjosirtly grabbing the headlines. But please don’t forget all the industry based projects that have gone before it like the Air Products one in Texas that has already delivered 1Mt of CO2 for EOR use. Of course one of my pet projects Sleipner that has been Injecting with no issues for 18 years. The message here is; CCS is not an “end of pipe” dream as some would like the world to believe its real.

AS for the conference itself,we have some headline grabbers for you to listen to in plenary tomorrow morning to kick things off. Julio Freedman USDOE spoke at the SaskPower event a few days before and as ever he is fired up and on a mission to deliver CCS to the world. David Victor has just recently published an article in Nature in which he says “ditch the 2C scenario “ if he discusses this that will be new and novel and I for one hope he does. I don’t envy Juho Lipponen who has to follow these guys but he is a great speaker himself and can more that hold his own in any company and the IEA is doing great work on assessing the potential for gas fired CCS. And that’s just the opening session.

So you can get a tiny glimpse of what is getting me excited, I hope you are too and it all starts tonjosirt with the opening reception which will have a texan flavour to it.

I hope you all stick around till the end when you will get to have your say in the closing plenary on the status of CCS be there to be part of the message the conference sends out to the CCS detractors around the globe.