Newsletter from the SUCCESS centre – March 2013 – no. 8

ful newsAnnual winter seminarExperts of tomorrow are educated in SUCCESS

There are about 30 PhD students and PostDocs in the SUCCESS centre and collaborating projects. Most of them met in Bergen 11-12 March for the centre’s annual Winter Seminar. I am impressed of all the results they have achieved! One aim of the SUCCESS centre is to educate experts of tomorrow, and after joining the seminar I can see that a lot of young experts working in the centre are deliver-ing top level research. The presentations – given by both students and re-searchers – were at a very high international academic level. But what impressed me most were the enthusias-tic and lively discussions. The chairs had a difficult job keeping the time schedule because of all the questions and comments that came up after each presentation. This is a good sign, because we need young experts that are enthusiastic and eager to bring CO2 storage forward. An interesting part of the seminar was the training in communication skills. It is well known that a PhD study means years of hard studies on a narrow subject. For CO2 storage in general, it is a huge challenge to commu-nicate the findings in an understandable way to a broader audience, including policy makers and the public in gen-eral. This is always difficult, and I was therefore pleased to see that the young scientist got good training at the seminar by professionals through case studies and role plays. When the results were presented, it even turned out as a very entertaining session, and it seemed to me that the young experts enjoyed the training. In the years to come we are hoping for many interna-tional large scale projects that demonstrate CO2 storage. To achieve this we need academia, industry and policy makers to work together. Some of the scientists we need to achieve this will most likely be those experts that we met at the SUCCESS Winter Seminar.

Aage Stangeland (Research Council of Norway)

A selection of the win-ter seminar speakers: (left) Maria Ele-nius, Javad Naseryan-Moghadam and Sarah Gasda; (right) Rohaldin Miri, Ingrid Anell and Irfan Baig. Aage Stangeland at bottom left.

Midway evaluation

Is SUCCESS a success?The research centres for environmentally-friendly energy (the FMEs) are financed on a 5+3 years basis. This means that the Research Council at halftime will evaluate each centre to decide if funding will be given for the last three years. This process is now running, even though this is a little early for the SUCCESS centre, as we started one year later than most others. The Research Council has appointed an evalu-ation panel to look into the scientific and organi-zational results so far. Last fall the centre and all its research and industry partners delivered self-evaluations, and on March 13th (the day after our winter seminar) the centre met with the panel. The meeting consisted of three sessions. In the morning the panel discussed the project with the the scientific leaders and the work package lead-ers. Later on it met with the PhD students, and the last session had representatives from the manage-ment and the partner institutions.

The panel consists of four international experts. Two of these are generalists partaking in all center evaluations, professor emeritus Per Stenius from Finland (chair) and Mattias Lundberg from the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova. The other two are specialists on the specific centre topic, in our case Christian Bernstone from Vattenfall in Sweden and Vit Hladik from the Czech Geological Survey. The meetings with the panel took place in a friendly atmosphere, and we are now looking forward to the panel’s report – and of course the decision of the Research Council regarding further funding. For SUCCESS the process of self-evaluation has been fruitful, and we are sure that the panel will deliver constructive input on how we can improve our work and become a real success.

From the first of the evaluation sessions. The expert panel and representatives from the Research Council to the left, and the scientific leaders of the SUCCESS centre to the right. Kåre Vagle, chair of the SUCCESS centre board at the far end.

Please note the datesSUCCESS fall seminarOctober 22nd and 23rd

While the SUCCESS winter seminar mainly focuses on work within the project, our annual fall seminar also brings in speakers and hopefully inspiration from the outside world. The program will be ready before summer catches us, but please note the dates now.

2013 CLIMIT summit

International focus on CCSThe third CLIMIT Summit was held in the end of February at the Soria Moria Hotel in Oslo. The increased international focus actualized the gather-ing with its 200 delegates both from the industry and from research institutes. The invited speakers gave an update on status and plans for CCS out-side Norway. In addition, news from CLIMIT was released together with CLIMITs new programme plan, presented by Klaus Schöffel from Gassnova. An important lesson to take home from the Summit, is that CCS has to be commercially viable to become an important strategy to combat climate change. The present trade regime with CO2 quotas will not contribute to this, due to the relatively low quota price, and is therefore not a sufficient incen-tive. EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) might become an important commercial driver to further develop CCS as a tool to reduce the CO2 emis-sions, as pointed out by Director Mark Ackiewicz of Fossil Energy Program, US Department of Energy, in his open-ing talk. One of CLIMITs tools to increase in-ternational cooperation, is a new agree-ment with the German COMPLETE project and the CO2 test centre at Ket-zin, presented by Axel Liebscher from

GFZ-Postdam and Head of Centre for Geological Storage. Discussions on how this bilateral coop-eration could be further strengthened and utilized followed the talk in a workshop. In addition to talks with the international focus on CCS, there were also talks and poster exhibi-tions conveying the latest research in capture and storage. Among the more than 60 CLIMIT supported projects present in the poster exhibi-tion, SUCCESS was thoroughly presented as well as many of its collaborating projects. Thus, the CLIMIT Summit has become an important forum for SUCCESS to present its research as well as for networking with industrial partners and other experts in CCS.

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More about the 2013 CLIMIT Summit in Norwegian at climit.no and geoforskning.no.

SUCCESS participants at the 2013 CLIMIT Summit. Marion Børresen, NGI (left), Charlotte Krafft, CMR, and Astri Kvassnes, NIVA (Photo: Claude R. Olsen, CLIMIT).

Worth reading

Helge Hellevang, Van T.H. Pham, Per Aagaard: Kinetic modelling of CO2–water–rock interactions; In-ternational Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control 15 (2013) 3–15

Highlights: * A review is given of thermodynamic data and common kinetic expressions. * Key reac-tions can be identified and the system can thereby be strongly simplified. * Reactions can be solved by simple analytical expressions rather than complex ODE’s.

SUCCESS (Subsurface CO2 Storage – Critical Elements and Superior Strategy) is one of several Norwe-gian centres for environment-friendly energy research, funded by the Norwegian Research Council and industry partners. For more info and contact address: www.fme-success.no.

To subscribe to this newsletter, please mail Charlotte.Krafft@cmr.no.

Our VIRCOLA Worker

Saman Tavakoli started in his position as a scien-tist at Christian Michelsen Research AS (CMR) February 25. He will be involved in the Virtual CO2 Laboratory (VIRCOLA) project in connection with the SUCCESS project. Saman defended his Ph.D thesis in December 2012 at Applied Geophysics, Luleå University of Technology in Sweden. The main aim of his project was, together with other partners involved, to unravel and model ca. 5 km of the upper crust by integrating geological and geophysical data to create a dynamic and evolutionary (4D) model of the crust for volcanogenic massive sulfide (VMS) exploration in the Skellefte mining district, north-ern Sweden. Saman will cooperate with the partners in-volved in the SUCCESS project, for integration and co-visualization of the multi-disciplinary (e.g. geological, geophysical and petrophysical, geome-chanical) data, starting with data from the CO2 site located in Longyearbyen, Svalbard. The research will therefore involve close collaboration between partners from diverse research disciplines to deve-lop a versatile visualization platform with the aim of better understanding of the storage capacity, injectivity and long term confinement of the CO2.

Leader of WP 1 in SUCCESS, Helge Hellevang was invited to make a presentation at the LE STUDIUM conference «Geochemical Reactivity in CO2 Geological Storage Sites», held in Orléans, France, February 25–26. The topic of the invited talk was the role of dawsonite in CO2 mineral trap-ping, a topic Helge has been working on for nearly a decade. The main aim of the conference was to trigger active discussion and possibly generate post-conference scientific networking, and the aim was indeed fulfilled.

SUCCESS in Orléans

CCS calendar 2013• EGU, Vienna 7–12 April, http://www.egu2013.eu/• 8th CO2GeoNet Open Forum, Venice 9–11 April,

http://www.cgseurope.net/• Carbonchain project meeting, Norwich, April

24–26• ACI 5th Carbon Capture & Storage Summit, Rot-

terdam 15–16 May, http://www.wplgroup.com/aci/conferences/eu-ecc5.asp

• The 7th Trondheim CCS Conference (TCCS-7), June 4–6, http://www.sintef.no/Projectweb/TCCS-7/

• 75th EAGE Conference & Exhibition, London 10–13 June, http://www.eage.org/

• IEAGHG Combined Modelling and Risk Manage-ment Network Meeting, Trondhem June 10–13, http://www.ieaghg.org/

• SIAM Conference on Mathematical and Compu-tational Issues in the Geosciences, Padova June 17–20, http://www.siam.org/meetings/gs13/

• ASLO meetings, http://www.aslo.org/meetings/calendar.html

• The Svalbard Course, August 5–15, http://www.svalbardkurset.no/

Wishing you all a splendid and SUCCESSful Easter