Wednesday morning here in Austin has begun with two technical plenaries – one from Gary Rochelle (The University of Texas at Austin, and our co-host of this year’s conference) and the other from Xu Shishen, President of China’s Huaneng Clean Energy Research Institute.

Gary began with a technical review of amine scrubbing for commercial CO2 capture power plants, looking at the Lubbock, Thompson (both Texas) and Boundary Dam (Saskatchewan) projects. Xu Shishen presented on GreenGen and the CO2 capture projects of CHNG, noting that improving efficiency and reducing cost will be the main future goals and that international cooperation will be very important for CCUS RD&D.

Kelly Thambimuthu, Chair of the IEAGHG Programme, then moved on to the GHGT conference series’ Greenman Award. This tradition presents an award at each conference to an individual who has made significant vital contributions to progressing the CCS technologies and to enhancing the understanding of the process of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Kelly was proud to announce that the winner of this year’s respected and prominent Greenman Award was Hallvard Svendsen, from NTNU.

Many congratulations to Hallvard, who has now been added to the select few who can proudly call themselves Greenman Award recipients!