ECR Alumni Case Study – Gareth Johnson

What did you study at university?

My undergraduate degree was in Earth Science, geology essentially, which is where I started getting interested in carbon capture and storage. There was a course in my final year where we had to pick a research topic – I gave a presentation on Sleipner and then ended up doing my undergraduate thesis on CO₂ leakage from natural seeps in Utah. So, that was my initial foray into CCS.

Then I did a PhD in Geoscience at the University of Calgary, Canada, which was on isotopic monitoring of CO₂ injection, working on a number of CO₂ injection sites across Canada. 20 years on I’m still in CCS!

Canada – Geochemical sampling at the Weyburn CO2 EOR project, and hiking in the Canadian Rockies

That’s great! What’s your current role, and your career journey to this point?

When I graduated from my undergraduate degree, I went to work for a structural geology company in Glasgow, for about 18 months before I did my PhD. I still had a keen interest to pursue CCS research further, but I didn’t feel like applying for a PhD in my final undergraduate year as I was pretty busy trying to get through my finals! Then this opportunity to work in industry came up, an internship, with a consulting company who worked across lots of different sectors. They primarily had oil and gas projects, but at that time they did a bit of mining as well as starting to dabble in CCS.

So, I got a taste for industrial experience but then went off to Canada and did my PhD, which took me four years. Afterwards, I went back to work for that same company for another three years. By that point, CCS was picking up and the company had space for me to grow that for them, so I led on non oil and gas projects, e.g. geothermal, nuclear waste storage and CCS. I really enjoyed it but still had the bug for research.

My undergraduate degree and my PhD were both very applied, so I spent a lot of time working with industry during them. And when I was in back in industry, I was still working very closely with researchers and going to things like UKCCSRC biannual meetings (now conferences).  I started working a lot with Stuart Haszeldine, and ended up going to the University of Edinburgh, where I did a series of postdocs with Stuart for about five years.  Then I moved to the University of Strathclyde and did another five years with Zoe Shipton, before I started at Drax just over two years ago.

It’s been a sort of backwards and forwards between industry and academia, to be honest, but although I’m back in industry again, I’m still working very much at the research end of it.  My current role is Head of CCS Sustainability at Drax, so I get to poke my nose into all the projects we’re doing which involve carbon capture and storage, thinking about the sustainability aspects of it – everything from the plant build, through to how we would operate those projects, and what we need to fulfil in terms of our obligations on the sustainability side. I also have a role sitting in the Science and Evidence team as well, where we make sure that Drax is on top of what’s happening in the research world.  We not only ensure we’re making best use of the research that’s going on but also input to that as well, giving our insights into projects and sitting on advisory boards, etc.  Again, it’s this bleed through between industry and academia, and I’m a strong advocate of the need for both those elements.

The movement you’ve had between industry and academia several times is fascinating. It clearly can be beneficial – that connection of industry and research is obviously what the UKCCSRC is all about – and one can inform the other and have good synergy. But how did you find it moving between them?

It’s not easy. I’ve fairly deliberately made those decisions – some of them have been opportune moments but I’ve always been intrigued to sit at that interface. I was lucky in some respects that immediately when I finished my undergraduate degree, that industry opportunity came up which allowed me to sit very close to the research space, and then go back in and do a PhD and spend some time in academia again.

So, although I’ve sat between the two, when I moved to Drax a couple years ago that felt like it was a much bigger decision about potentially closing the door on the academic path. You’re unlikely to get tenure as an academic if you’re going to dip in and out of academia. There’s a certain expectation of the amount of postdoc-ing that’s expected of someone before they get a full tenured position and quite a defined route, so after a while, if you’re not following that, you’re probably going to be overlooked for it.  There are always exceptions to that rule though!  I was lining up a permanent position at Strathclyde when the Drax opportunity came up, so that was a big decision as I don’t know whether I’d be able to go back into something like that in the future.  I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve had in both sectors, and it means I’m comfortable in academia and industry, as well as connecting the two.

When did you first come across the UKCCSRC? And how much did you engage with us?

It was about 2005/6, I attended a meeting of the UK CCS community in Edinburgh, with a presentation by Linda Stalker from CSIRO on monitoring.  I don’t remember exactly but I think that must have been around the time of the origins of the UKCCSRC.  I started getting more involved when I came back from Canada after my PhD, and it was a huge part of being able to build a UK-based CCS career.  I’d been in Canada for four years and there was loads happening there, but when I came back to the UK there wasn’t a lot happening industrially here then.  And I wasn’t tied into the UK academic network at all.  So, the biannual meetings started to grease the wheels of that.

When I came to work in Edinburgh as a postdoc for Stuart Haszeldine, then I got much more involved through quite a few different projects.  In 2013/14, I helped write and get funding from the UKCCSRC for the Otway project in Australia, which was a direct follow on from my PhD research. I worked with Stuart Gilfillan on that one, and we got to travel out to Otway and do the sampling.

Gareth working on the Otway project, Australia

We also got some UKCCSRC funding to run some field work in South Africa, working with colleagues at the South African CCS Centre and their equivalent of the BGS, the South African Council for Geoscience.  At the same time, I also had an international collaboration role with SCCS, trying to build links between the UK research community and international projects.

Gareth in South Africa, leading the way through the river!

I did all the usual things with the UKCCSRC too – attending the biannual meetings (conferences), webinars, etc. and I now sit on the Advisory Council as well. So, it’s been a pretty big part of the last 15 years of my career.

In what ways do you feel like the UKCCSRC has helped that?

For me, it’s the consistency and continuity that the UKCCSRC has brought over those years.  The network has been an important part of maintaining CCS and the community in the UK.  Anybody that’s spent any time in CCS in the UK has had those depressing days – I can remember vividly being in the BGS building in Edinburgh when the plug got pulled on the UK projects again in 2015 – and having that network of colleagues, but also friends, to commiserate with and think about what you’re going to do next is vital. And, I don’t want to inflate Jon’s ego too much, but there was a lot of thinking and work by the UKCCSRC in the wake of some of those setbacks which have set us up for where we are today, like with the UK cluster sequencing.  It’s been essential to sustain us through those political swings and the ups and downs that the CCS community has been through.  So, I think it’s had an outsized role really, in both my career and also in UK CCS.

That’s fantastic!  Do you have any other thoughts you’d like to share about CCS – its present, its future, any concerns?

Like I’ve already mentioned, CCS has been on quite a journey and it’s ridden the highs and the lows over the last 20 years. I think it’s really important that we learn from those previous failures, and I think we have. I’ve got a lot of friends who would still question me, “Is it [CCS] really ever going to be a big thing?”. I think we’re at the point of it actually happening now.

We’ve seen a lot of final investment decisions (FIDs) over the last six months. On my side of the table in the carbon dioxide removal (CDR) world, the Stockholm Exergi plant in Sweden made their FID a few weeks ago and there have been other big BECCS projects get over the line recently too. I’m personally a bit disappointed that Drax couldn’t be first to the table on that, but it’s a great sign of where BECCS is heading. Coupled with that, there’s the Northern Lights project going into their second phase, there’s Porthos and other projects in the Netherlands progressing, and the east coast cluster FID at the end of last year, as well as promising news from Hynet more recently.  So, I really do think we’re on the cusp of seeing this becoming a decent sized industry.

There are, of course, more hurdles to come, and it needs to significantly scale up.  I think that would be where my main concern is right now.  We’re seeing horrendous daily impacts from climate change and, although we’re regularly trotting out lines like “CCS is a necessity, not an option” and “there’s no route to one half degrees without CCS”, we’re nowhere near the scale we need to be able to achieve that. So, there’s a concern that we’re not actually deploying at the rate and scale we need to, and whether we’ll meet our domestic targets in the UK at the moment, I think, is questionable. There’s a need for us to rapidly take the wins that we’ve got right now and scale quickly, and that’s not going to be easy. But we’ve learned a lot over the last decade and I think it’s definitely possible.

Hopefully, we’re on the cusp, and there’s some tantalizing research and industrial results coming out which show that there might be some game-changing technologies out there.  Or the potential advances of AI in terms of cost reductions and efficiencies, even in terms of speeding up the permitting process. So, instead of it taking years to get a Class VI Well permit in the US, you might be able to do that in a matter of months, through the use of AI.  I think there are some exciting signs that we could accelerate this and bring the costs down. I’m still optimistic. I still think it’s a necessity and I’m hopeful that we’ll meet that challenge!