IEAGHG Summer School: Making lasting connections and friendships while working towards the future deployment of CCS

I was lucky enough to gain a place upon this years IEAGHG Summer School in Regina, Saskatchewan, which ran from 17-22 July 2017.  We were welcomed to The University of Regina with a networking dinner, hosted by our sponsors, The International CCS Knowledge Centre. Amazingly, this years Summer School was attended by 36 students who travelled from 14 countries worldwide, which gave me a fascinating insight into not only their research, but also the state of CCS within their countries.

The week was very well planned, with the majority of our days taken up by a series of talks which covered the whole CCS chain, from capture, storage, environmental, policy and economics. On our first evening we were placed into pre-selected groups, assigned two mentors and given a challenging question for us to go away, think about and present to Summer School attendees at the end of the week.  My group, composed of Guoping Hu, Martin Haaf, Ben Callow and Korede Akinpelumi and myself, were posed the question “Does CO₂-EOR have a place in the carbon dioxide capture and storage chain?” We decided to tackle this from several different angles – Environmental, Technical, Economics and Policy, and presented our findings in the style of a panel discussion.

By far the highlight of the week was our trip to SaskPower Boundary Dam and PTRC Aquistore. It was amazing to finally get to Boundary Dam, after reading about it for so long, with staff welcoming any questions to advance our understanding and learning. The Aquistore Project also provided us with a great opportunity to visit a geological field laboratory focused upon the injection of CO₂, which was a great help to my own PhD research.

Overall, I had the most fantastic experience at the IEAGHG Summer School, and would recommend any post-graduate studying CCS to attend. Not only did it advance my learning and provide me with opportunity to meet CCS professionals, I was also able to make lasting connections and friendships with fellow postgraduates working towards the future deployment of CCS.