An insight into the IEAGHG CCS Summer School (Darwin 2024) from ECR Jacqueline Penn

In June, I had the incredible opportunity to attend the IEAGHG international CCS summer school in Darwin, Australia. The week-long summer school included an intensive program of lectures from world-leading experts about the whole CCS chain including capture, transport, storage, monitoring, economics and policy. The program also included evening group work in teams of nine students to evaluate challenging questions related to CCS, with guidance from the expert mentors. There was also a field trip to the Darwin LNG Facility to learn more about the Darwin CO₂ Hub.

The IEAGHG Summer School 2024 attendees!

On day 1, we learned about why CCS is needed to reach net zero by 2050, and key updates from the latest technical reports including the IEA Net Zero Roadmap 2023 update, and the IPCC AR6 synthesis report 2023. We then learned about CO₂ capture, different processes (pre-combustion, post-combustion and oxyfuel) and technologies (absorption, adsorption, membranes, biotechnology, etc) including examples of real facilities using these different processes like the Callide Oxyfuel Project (0.3 MT CO₂/yr), the Mitsubishi Petra Nova post combustion project (1.4 Mt CO₂/yr) and the Dakota Gasification Company’s Great Plains Synfuels Plant using pre-combustion CO₂ separation (3MT CO₂/yr).

Day 2 was all about transport and storage. First, we learned about shipping and pipeline transport. Key learning points included the importance of CO₂ purity in transport (impurities can cause corrosion and the formation of secondary phases and solid particles, among other issues), and economic considerations of shipping vs pipeline transport. There is a distance at which shipping becomes cheaper than pipeline transport due to the need for repressurisation – this distance is dependent on the amount of CO₂ being transported and increases as the amount of CO₂ increases.

Then, in the storage and monitoring lectures, we learned about reservoirs, traps, capacity, injectivity and containment. My key takeaway on storage was that getting an accurate assessment of the storage volume of a potential storage site is time consuming and expensive – there are ways to quickly estimate storage capacity, but a detailed assessment of the site is needed before a project can be considered ‘bankable’. Also, monitoring of CO₂ storage sites is important for fulfilling regulatory requirements, as well as reassuring stakeholders including members of the public. There is a wide variety of deep and near-surface monitoring techniques that may be deployed to meet these regulatory requirements including 2D/3D surface seismic, bubble stream detection, vertical seismic profiling and ground penetrating radar, and monitoring techniques required will be specific to the project.

Day 3 was a chance to get outside to visit the Santos Darwin LNG facility and learn more about the Darwin CO₂ Hub. The trip included a boat tour around the peninsula where the LNG plant is located. The LNG plant processes natural gas from the Bayu-Undan offshore gas field in the Timor Sea (connected by ~500 km pipeline) which is then shipped to international markets. There are plans (a non-binding MOU between Santos and Timor-Leste’s national oil company TIMOR GAP) for Australia to store CO₂ offshore in the Bayu-Undan field.

Jacky in front of the Darwin LNG facility (taken from the boat)

Day 4 started off on the theme of environmental impacts of geological CO₂ storage, particularly related to stakeholder assurance. Environmental concerns from CO₂ and/or brine migration include: impacting drinking water, risk of asphyxiation and effects on the health of the ecosystem. Fortunately, CO₂ storage projects have been very safe, so our learnings about CO₂ leaks come from controlled release experiments. We then covered policy, legislation and funding models relating to CCS, including learning about the UK government’s approach to the cluster sequencing programme, and Norway’s Northern Lights project.

Day 5 was our opportunity to present our group projects, which we had been working on in the evenings after lectures. It was great to watch the other groups’ informative and fun presentations, including ones in the form of episodes of Dr Phil (Dr Philip Llewellyn’s group) and Shark Tank (appropriately re-named ‘croc-tank’!). We then celebrated the end of an amazing week with a fantastic Gala dinner, and an impromptu night-out in Darwin’s best Irish bar, Shenannigans.

Group project team with mentors Owain Tucker (Shell) and Peta Ashworth (Curtin University)

Overall, it was an amazing experience, where I learned so much about CCS and met so many inspiring people, in both the expert mentors and the other attendees. It was a truly unique opportunity to connect with people passionate about CCS from around the world, and I would recommend applying to any early career professional in the field of CCS. I am grateful to my PhD supervisors Dr Greg Mutch and Prof. Ian Metcalfe for their support with my application and travel funding.

Jacqueline Penn, Newcastle University