The 49th bi-annual IEAGHG ExCo meeting has come to a close in the beautiful Norweigen city of Bergen. Hosted by Gassnova, the meeting began on the 10th May with a visit to the Technology Centre Mongstad. This centre is the world's largest facility for testing and improving CO2 capture. Knowledge gained will prepare the ground for CO2 capture initiatives to combat climate change. TCM is a joint venture between the Norweigen state, Shell and Statoil.

Following on from this site visit, an exciting seminar was held titled 'Milestone Mongstad 4'. An extremely interesting array of talks were presented and a very exciting announcement was made which confirmed that TCM and SINTEF had formalised their collaboration. An in-depth article for this announcement can be found here: www.tcmda.com/en/Press-center/News/2016/TCM-and-SINTEF-formalizes-CCS-collaboration . The seminar was rounded off with a fabulous dinner, which allowed the delegates that had attended to discuss everything they had heard and learnt that day.

The two day IEAGHG Executive Committee meeting itself began on Wednesday 11th May and was held in the excellent Scandic Neptun hotel. This regular meeting is held twice yearly, at different locations across the world each time, and gives IEAGHG an opportunity to provide our Members and Sponsors with programme progress, an update of recently completed and on-going activities and to approve any future work to be undertaken. It also gives our Members a chance to report back to the Programme on their activities over the last 6 months and any activities planned for the near future.

The Programme's ExCo Members were given an overview of recent activities such as the recently completed Costs to CO2-EOR study and Fault Permeability amongst others. Recent and upcoming events were reported on too – these included the extremely important side-event which was held at COP-21, feedback from our LCA workshop, an update on our Summer School (both 2015 feedback and also 2016 progress) and of course, the ever-popular, outstanding GHGT conference which will be held in Lausanne, Switzerland 14th-18th November 2016

Members agreed to take forward 3 new studies this year plus a set of guidelines – so do stay tuned to see the progress in these various areas; more details will come soon.

The ExCo dinner at this meeting was held in the elegant restaurant of the Scandic hotel. Members were all very eager to discuss the outcomes of the first day and to have a chance to relax and enjoy the Bergen setting.

A full-length article on the 49th IEAGHG ExCo meeting will be available in the upcoming June edition of the IEAGHG Greenhouse News.