ECR Alumni Case Study – Diarmaid Clery

What did you study at university? 

I did an integrated MEng in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leeds from 2009 to 2013.  That gave me a good background understanding of engineering principles, of things that are relevant to CCS, but very much from the mechanical side.

As part of my Master’s year, I picked a module that was based around renewable energy.  I then looked at doing a PhD, but there wasn’t much research going on in that area at that time. There was a CDT (Centre for Doctoral Training) in ‘Low Carbon Technologies’ at Leeds though and I applied for that, but didn’t get a place on the course. Instead, I got a job at what was Foster Wheeler Energy (now Wood Group Plc), an engineering design group who do a lot of designing for oil and gas platforms, etc.

I spent a year doing that, but then realised that I’d rather work on something renewable and more forward-looking, plus I missed the research element. The University of Leeds had another CDT starting then, which was in bioenergy. I didn’t really know too much about it, but it was linked to renewable, so I did a lot of research for my application (inspired by my previous disappointment), got a place and started in 2014. The great thing about a CDT is that they give you a year to do a Master’s in a new topic, a bit like retraining, so it didn’t matter that I wasn’t an expert in bioenergy. You have a year to learn about climate change and lifecycle analysis, and lots of other relevant topics – things that an engineer wouldn’t necessarily know about.

The Bioenergy CDT was brilliant, because I got involved in different research centres as part of that, including the Priestley Centre, who are a climate change research centre. They did some training, and then I did a few different projects all related to bioenergy. As part of that as well as thinking about what I’d like to do for my PhD, I was introduced to the key climate change reports, like the IPCC’s, and started reading about carbon capture and storage within those. There were lots of reports at the time saying, “we need to do CCS, it’s very important if we want to be able to tackle climate change”, and I decided I’d like to do something focused on that.

I became aware of a Professor in Chemistry, Chris Rayner, who’d started a small carbon capture company called C-Capture, developing a great green chemistry. So, I met with him and then Professor Jenny Jones, who was head of the CDT and looking at biomass combustion. They came together and were happy to supervise my project which was on the impacts of combining biomass combustion with CCS (BECCS) and the chemistry degradation of the amine side of things. Given my engineering background, it was quite a stretch being in a chemistry lab where you’re looking at how chemicals degrade, etc. It was out of my comfort zone at the time, but I guess you learn from doing something that’s not in your comfort zone – how to manage, how to do new things and how to get support from the people around you.  It was quite a big learning curve, but it was really interesting and felt like something that could help with tackling climate change.

How did you end up on the social sciences side of CCS?

By the end of my PhD, I’d become very interested in the topic of BECCS. From reading about the topic over the three years of my studies, I’d started to understand some of the policy implications, and I was lucky enough to get UKRI funding for a three-month internship in the government. That was super interesting, because you could literally see how decisions were made, how research might feed into that and how policy works.

Then, just as I was finishing my PhD, Professor Naomi Vaughan at the University of East Anglia was advertising for a postdoc researcher on her project about the feasibility of afforestation and BECCS for greenhouse gas removals (GGR). It was a two-year post, focused on delivering workshops, talking to people and working with stakeholders. My experience from the policy internship really helped me get that role as well as understand how to make the most of such an interesting post. But it was another new learning curve – working in social sciences and having to learn all the social theories I hadn’t studied before.

It can seem like you make one choice that’s a natural step from what you’ve been doing, but coming at it from a slightly different perspective, and suddenly it’s launched you in a different direction.

True! From a scientific angle, we decided that, rather than just have one workshop, it would be more beneficial if I went round and interviewed all of the professional stakeholders who were coming to the workshop, so I understood their angle of BECCS and GGR before they arrived.

I ended up doing maybe 20 interviews, travelling all over the UK and working mostly on a train for a month or so. Online meetings weren’t such a common thing back then, although it’s always good to meet in person! It was an interesting process and great to meet a whole range of people who were working within the GGR space. As part of the process of understanding them and their work, I got a greater insight into what they were doing, which furthered my learning from being an engineer doing chemistry in a lab. We really got to understand all their views on what was stopping GGR being a thing.

Social scientists can actually get an amazing overview that no one else has, talking to all the different players and starting to see connections and put things together.

Absolutely, it’s really brilliant for getting a broad overview and understanding what all the problems are, meaning that you can piece together common threads and start to find solutions.

I then had a three-month period after the project funding ended, before two jobs appeared at the same time – one was a post-doctoral researcher that I’d been waiting for at the University of Manchester and also a role in DESNZ, as a policy advisor on CCS.

How did you choose?

I decided that if I went for policy, then I’d no longer be a researcher/scientist. I think once you’re out of academia and you’ve stopped publishing then it becomes really hard to get back into it, so I thought I’d give the researcher role at the Tyndall Centre in Manchester a go. That was for two years at the time, focused on the community angle and social aspects of social license to operate (SLO) for industrial decarbonisation and another project on BECCS in the northwest.  Towards the end of that, we got another project for another six months and then, after that, I managed to get my lectureship, which is permanent – it was really nice to finally secure a permanent role after lots of short-term research contracts.

So, I’m now a Lecturer in Engineering for Net Zero and teach on mechanical and civil engineering.  I bring in the community angle and the social aspects, but I’d like to move more towards climate change social aspects and we’re developing a module on that. I’m part of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research which is amazing place to work – the centre brings together five universities to provide interdisciplinary solutions to climate change. I am constantly learning from my Tyndall colleagues, and I use their findings to inform the direction of my own work. My research is now examining social, policy and technical aspects of greenhouse gas removals (GGR), whereas my teaching focuses on the engineering side.

I’d love to work on a project that’s got a bit of both technical and social aspects, but the challenge is finding a research council that values bringing those together. I think, especially with CCS and CDR going forward, that most of the problems are more social science. A lot of people think that social science means social acceptance for CCS, and I used to think that too. But I now understand it’s broader than that, and includes policy as well as other big decisions, like which political leaders are doing something to act on climate change? Or, what’s happening at an international level – what’s the feeling on tackling fossil fuels or reducing fossil fuels? Those are the real key aspects for me that are driving whether CCS or CDR happens, and at what speed it happens. There are technical aspects you need to be able to scale but, from what I’ve seen, I think it’s much more driven by policy and social aspects.

For example, you might technically know the best way to build a pipeline across the country, but not fully consider the social aspects and maybe some environmental impacts. You can then get kickback, as we’ve seen in a few places in the UK, where people don’t feel like they’ve been consulted properly, and that can have large impacts on their opinion of a project.

We’ve done research on the HyNet project in North West England and nearby we saw the Hydrogen Village plan being knocked back, and it’s a very similar feeling to the Peak District CO₂ pipeline now. People feel like they haven’t been consulted and, even though there are some consultations going on now, it all depends on how the project is being delivered. It can cause a lot of emotions for some locals whose lives are being impacted, to the point where they can protest and push for a project to get rejected. We found evidence of a spillover effect, where people had previously rejected fracking in their area and the networks that had been set up to oppose that and therefore already knew what they were doing, turned their attention to the Hydrogen Village Project.

But it’s difficult, because if the Peak District pipeline gets rejected, then it’s still critical that we decarbonise the cement manufacturers in the middle of the country. We’d have to move towards other forms of transportation, like trucks or trains, which bring their own challenges. We can’t reach the net-zero targets our planet needs without including these hard-to-decarbonise industries.

In that whole journey, when did you come across the UKCCSRC, and how did you engage with us?

Yeah, quite early doors really, I guess it would have been around the time that the White Rose project was cancelled, and I’d just started to get into CCS research as part of my PhD. I started attending the biannual conferences and it just seemed like such a great obvious network to be a part of when you’re researching CCS. It helped me get an awareness of what other research was happening out there and understand what was going on with these failed competitions.

I often presented the technical work that I was doing on biomass combustion and chemical amine degradation through posters. I remember talking to Bryony Livesey [now UKCCSRC Board Chair!] about my poster at one point – I didn’t have a clue who she was and then it’s like, oh, she’s heading up the Industrial Decarbonisation Challenge!  You meet people from every level and area of CCS at these events and everyone’s really friendly.

More recently, I’ve given talks on research projects that we’ve done at UKCCSRC conferences, training courses and ECR Awaydays. It’s been a really useful network for me for the last 10 or so years.

Do you have any other thoughts about CCS that you haven’t had a chance to share? Its present, its future, any concerns, anything you’re optimistic about?

I think, at present, it’s interesting because in the UK, CCS is close to becoming a reality soon. There’s been a lot of research, but we haven’t started storing any CO₂ yet. There’s talk of there being this kind of race between clusters to actually do that, so we’ll see what happens.

Moving forward with CCS in the UK, I think the social aspects need to be carefully considered. As CCS is delivered, we need to think carefully about how we then bring in those other hard-to-decarbonise areas especially non-coastal sites – that’s the main challenge at the moment. It’s a lot harder to deliver than if you’re on the coast already, where an offshore pipeline affects people less. That’s an area which needs more investigation, including how communication on the topic of CCS happens. I’m happy to do that if anyone wants to fund it!