UKCCSRC September 2019 Conference: Panel Session – Getting rapid impact for MI

Fereshteh Hojatisaeidi, London South Bank University, Hisham Al Baroudi, Cranfield University and Long Jiang, Cranfield University highlight the key points presented during the Panel Session on the second day of the UKCCSRC Autumn Programme Conference.  

The deliberations that took place at the Panel session of the UKCCSRC Autumn programme Conference 2019 focused on how to accelerate the mission and innovation through the projects, chaired by Jon Gibbins, from UKCCSRC. Following the warm welcome given to the speakers, Brian Allison, from BEIS gave a brief update/introduction to the audience about mission and innovation challenges set up including the carbon capture challenge. He was more interested in engaging the audience and expressed his willingness to hear what panel had to say.

The next speaker, Jeremy Carey, illustrated the strategies to accelerate research impact. He believes that we need a very strong leadership to steepen learning curves, embrace disruptive technologies, increase industry clockspeed and boost strategic open innovation. He continued to illustrate the “Hype Cycle” for emerging technologies, 2009. In the hype cycle, he pointed out that some industries have a very high “clockspeed” to innovate as opposed to CCS which has a very slow one which should be increased to accelerate research impacts. He further described that the learning curve can be manipulated through the leadership. He also highlighted that most R&D project are incremental and only few projects are truly disruptive; nevertheless, the gradient of learning curves can be influenced by strategic R&D, learning by doing, economies of scale and learning by waiting.

The next speaker, Tony Espie, addressed how to accelerate the research progress through the projects. He emphasized that the real challenge to address is the scale-up of technologies form demonstration project to regional CCUS hubs. The wealth of his experience allowed him to have a clear understanding on the requirement of rapid impacts for mission innovation; he introduces a new prospective, which is that storage developers must be considered a starting point for the implementation of CCUS. He therefore gives an insight into the technological developments on storage for CCUS. As demonstrational projects grow into commercial ventures, regional hubs will be essential to decarbonise the power and industry sectors.

David Reiner introduced his speech with a good message: if we believe in net-zero strategies then we need to take a positive approach. As such, attention should be placed in spending on collaborations in total public R&D budgets, based on the policies and strategies in place in Canada and the US which have eventually increased focus on low-carbon technologies.

Following David, Mona spoke about her background and CCUS work she concentrated on in Norway. She explained that Norway is actively seeking to become one of the early-movers in CCUS by implementing shipping as a transportation method to store emissions in North Sea formations. This approach enhances flexibility, lower costs and allows to involve more European countries into the project form an early-stage. Mona cited the key importance of the establishment of a European CCUS, really explaining that the efforts to decarbonise the power and energy sectors should involve numerous stakeholders. Only then, CCUS will be applied successfully.

This blog was co-authored by Fereshteh Hojatisaeidi, London South Bank University, Hisham Al Baroudi, Cranfield University and Long Jiang, Cranfield University.