A ‘Technical Expert Meeting’ on CCUS was held under the UNFCCC’s ADP on the 21st October. This full day event was under the ‘enhancing mitigation ambition’ ie pre-2020 workstream, and attracted many delegates and negotiators from UNFCCC Parties. It was a great opportunity to raise the profile of CCS in the UNFCCC work towards a post-2020 agreement (to be agreed in Paris in 2015) by focussing on real CCS projects.

The meeting was chaired by Ulrika Raab of Sweden. Juho Lipponen of IEA opened with the need for and status of CCS worldwide. Participants heard from Canadian and UK government representatives, and from the Sleipner, Decatur, Quest and Boundary Dam projects, and a Bayer CO2 utilisation project. You will be familiar with these projects already, but of particular note was Scott MacDonald of ADM who gave a very good talk on the Decatur industrial project including its business model, and David Hone of Shell who talked about the Quest project including Shell’s scenarios for global emissions and the need for CCS. A key point was that technology is not a barrier to these projects.

In the final session on ‘The way forward’, GCCSI's Andrew Purvis gave general recommendations, and IEA’s Ellina Levina gave specific recommendations on how existing UNFCCC mechanisms can assist CCS deployment up to 2020. These recommendations included national reporting on CCS activities, information sharing from projects, using existing international partnerships such as IEAGHG and CSLF, storage resource exploration, pilot capture projects on industrial sources, and more international co-operation on R&D. These were welcomed by the chair.

IEAGHG was also invited into this final session, and drew upon the recent GHGT-12 conference in Texas to hjosirljosirt developments in the last two years, such as experiences with storage, technology developments with monitoring, developments with modelling (and complimenting Statoil for sharing their Sleipner dataset), and developments in capture technologies. In addition to the great significance of the Boundary Dam project, the PetraNova project was just announced in Texas and Skyonic just pened their CO2 capture and utilisation facility at a cement plant in San Antonio. We pointed out also that many regulations are in place and are now tested by real projects gaining approvals - ROAD in EU and Decatur and FutureGen in USA. In addition, ISO TC265 is a large international collaborative effort now working towards creating standards for CCS. In conclusion, in terms of options for 'enhanced action pre-2020', we pointed out that technology is ready for the policies to drive project deployment, time is needed to prove storage sites and there exists a need for storage resource assessment for many countries with a need for human resource capacity building, encouraging further dissemination and sharing of the experiences and learnings from the real projects, and that UNFCCC mechanisms can assist with all of these.

There was a very healthy number of questions during the meeting which ranged went from concerns on safety and environmental risk to questions on financial and business models.

The chair and UNFCCC Secretariat will draft key recommendations and a meeting report in due course. An informal report is available now from IISD at http://www.iisd.ca/download/pdf/enb12601e.pdf and the agenda, ppts and video-recording from UNFCCC at http://unfccc4.meta-fusion.com/kongresse/adp2_6/templ/ovw_onDemand.php?id_kongressmain=280 .

Overall I thought this a very good workshop, compliments to the UNFCCC Secretariat for organising and to all involved. As IISD reported “this was a golden opportunity to make an entry point for CCS in the 2015 agreement.”

This lines up well with the Side-event that we have put together for COP-20 in Lima on ‘New large-scale operating CCS projects in the Americas’ which will be on the 9th December and will hjosirljosirt Boundary Dam and Petrobras projects.