I was invited to give a talk to a local Green Party meeting who wanted a debate on CCS. This was the Stroud Green Party, Stroud being a town in the scenic Cotswold Hills known for its number of green councillors, independent spirit and high level of environmental awareness. They titled the debate "CCS – Essential for our future or a Trojan horse fo...
Once again, the UKCCSRC has held their biannual meeting, which took place in the University of Cambridge during 26-27th March. UKCCSRC leads and coordinates a programme of underpinning research on all aspects of CCS in support of basic science and UK government efforts on energy and climate change. This initiative receives support from the EPSRC an...
The STEMM-CCS project held its second annual meeting last week. This is an EU Horizon 2020 funded project that is developing environmental monitoring to test in-situ at a controlled release of CO2 in the seabed at the Goldeneye location in the North Sea (see IEAGHG 2017-IP14). The project is coordinated by the UK's National Oceanography Centr...
The University of Texas held their biennial conference on CCUS, UTCCS-4 on the 30-31 January. This conference combines the Texas Carbon Management Program's amine-based capture research, the Gulf Coast Carbon Center's applied research in storage, and the Center for Frontiers of Subsurface Energy Security program's more fundamental research in...
The Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) meetings in Abu Dhabi, UAE, were held from 4-6 December and concluded with the 7th CSLF Ministerial Meeting. The CSLF is a government-to-government agreement on developing CCS, it started in 2003 and now has 25 member countries and the European Commission, and consists of a Technical Group, a P...
There will be much analysis into the details coming out of COP-23, but my short summary is as follows. Progress was made in general in the details of the 'rulebook' for the Paris Agreement, but there is a lot of work still to do. As a result it is suggested there may need to be an extra UNFCCC Parties meeting before COP-24 in order to be read...
CEMCAP held its second ECRA/CEMCAP workshop in Dusseldorf, Germany, on the 7th November. CEMCAP is a collaborative project funded by the H2020 program which aims to increase the TRL of carbon capture systems applied to the cement industry and decrease the costs associated. Within the innovative concepts under development, we can find new cons...
On Saturday we reached the end of the first week of COP-23, which is meeting in Bonn from 6 to 17 November. Whilst physically in Bonn, the formal host is Fiji, the first time a small island state has presided over a COP. Fiji asked that a focus of this COP to be on oceans, and we responded in our UNFCCC Side-event on the 7th November (see ear...
Yesterday was our Side-event, co-organised with The University of Texas, Bellona and CCSA. It was well attended, with around 150 attendees, and lots of good questions. The side event started with Dr Carol Turley OBE presenting an update on ocean acidification and its significant impacts on the planet; even the NDCs pledged so far will still cause a...
As part of the CO2STCAP project, last week I went to the review meeting in Stockholm. Concurring with this, the 4th October was the Cinnamon Buns Day in Sweden and we celebrated both, the last advances on the project and such a nice local pastry. This project, funded by the CLIMIT program, Swedish Energy Agency and participant partners, is co...
It is the 39th meeting of the London Convention and the 12th meeting of the London Protocol this week, the global treaties that protect the marine environment. The detailed work on transboundary CCS was completed in 2012 (see IEAGHG 2013-IP26 and 2014-IP19) but outstanding is the ratification of the 2009 amendment for CO2 export which would r...
The International CCS Knowledge Centre held its first Global CCS Symposium with a theme of "Advancing a Path Forward", supporting the goal of the Centre to advance CCS globally. Some 160 attendees from 11 countries participated, including from China, Mexico, Indonesia, Bangladesh, South Africa, and from India by video, as well as Norway, Aust...
As part of the Mission Innovation CCUS workshop in Houston, we visited the Net Power project at La Porte. This is a pilot-scale demonstration of a novel direct-fired oxy-fired supercritical-CO2 gas turbine based on the Allam Cycle. In fact Rodney Allam himself was present and co-hosted the visit with Bill Brown the CEO of Net Power. The partn...
Mission Innovation (MI) is an international initiative seeking to double each government's investments in clean energy research and development over the next five years, with the goal of accelerating the pace of technology innovation to meet economic competitiveness, environmental, and energy security demands. It is estimated that the clean energy ...
The 5th Cost Network Meeting took place in Imperial College London, chaired by John Gibbins, from UKCCSRC. With the presence of a varied scientific community, once again this workshop was full of valuable presentations. The meeting was divided in two days, starting with a review on the UK studies and large CCS projects. From those sessions, i...
IPIECA is the global oil and gas industry association for environmental and social issues. They held a workshop on CCS on the 12th September at BP in London, bringing in a range of stakeholders to identity the key roles and actions to speed up CCS. Sessions covered costs and technical issues, policies and public issues, regional perspectives, busi...
The high temperature solid looping cycles (HTSLC) network meeting covers technology developments in fields where a solid material is cycled between multiple reactors at elevated temperatures. The scope of the IEAGHG HTSLC Network is to discuss recent progress in solids looping cycles such as calcium looping and sorption enhanced reforming for...
IEAGHG organised the fourth Post Combustion Capture Conference (PCCC4) in Birmingham, Alabama, supported by NCCC. The event attracted 110 attendees from 16 countries and included two visits to full-scale Carbon Capture facilities, the NCCC and Kemper sites. PCCC-4 opened with a visit to the NCCC facilities, where we were lucky to see the membrane-b...
As it does annually at this time of year, NETL chose Pittsburgh to host the 2017 review of the results and future plans of CO2 capture technology projects that currently receive funding from the US Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy. With the DOE having some involvement in the vast majority of research and development on CO2 capture in ...
The US DOE annual Carbon Storage Review meeting, held in Pittsburgh 1-3 August, included presentations on the latest technology innovations currently under development in the country. One of the challenges of secure subsurface storage is the ability to track CO2 in deep reservoirs. Fibre-optic distributed acoustic sensors (DAS) are attracting incre...
