The ISO TC265 met in Oslo this week and had a break from the work of standards development to visit the capture test facility at Heidelberg’s Norcem Brevik cement plant. The cement industry is responsible for around 1.9GTof global CO2 emissions, so Europe’s first CO2 capture test facility in the cement industry is an important development, and is organized by Heidelberg Cement, Norcem and the European Cement Research Academy (ECRA) . Commencing in 2013, so far it has tested four capture technologies, based on amine, solid sorbet, membrane, and calcium looping. The latest of these to be tested is Aker’s amine capture and this was seen in-place by the ISO group. This option is capturing over 90% of the CO2 from the slip-streamed flue gas stream, producing 99.9% CO2 stream, with full utilization of the waste heat. This stage of testing of these four technologies ends next month, but more R&D and benchmark evaluations are being planned for this facility. The ISO attendees also found it interesting just to experience an operating cement plant up close, providing an education on cement production from a historic plant that achieves its 100 year anniversary next year and exports its cement products widely around the world. Heidelberg uses a range of options to reduce its CO2 emissions, CCS just being one. The others include the use of alternative fuels, including, RDF, bone meal and other wastes, such that these now make up around 60% of the plant’s fuel, displacing coal as a fuel. Seeing the capture test facility at such a historic plant provided an appreciation of the retrofitability of these capture technologies.

The ISO TC265 week-long meeting was provided with another break from standards development with a half-day seminar on CCS in Norway. The 20 years and 20 million tonnes of CO2 injected by Statoil and the CCS policies and R&D programmes were shared and celebrated. News included that the US DOE have recently announced funding for GE, Alstom and the University of Kentucky to test their capture technologies at Technology Centre Mongstad (TCM). Also interesting was the work by Aker Solutions on doing CO2 EOR offshore, with some novel ideas of placing components subsea. We also learned that Sleipner was named after an ejosirt-legged horse in Norse mythology, apparently the best horse available for Odin to ride, so quite appropriate perhaps for that project.

This ISO TC265 meeting was attended by over 70 experts in CCS and standards from its 20 member countries and Liaison organisations such as IEAGHG. As this ISO world progresses with producing technical reports and standards development for all parts of the CCS chain (several draft standards now exist for transport, storage and terminology), IEAGHG contributes the results of its technical programme, and presented an update on recent and forthcoming activities. Of particular relevance to the work of TC265 is the Special Issue of the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control on the developments since the IPCC Special Report, which provides excellent summaries of the status of CCS technologies.