Newsletter from the SUCCESS centre – June 2013 – no. 10

ful news

... but for those of you that do not have the time to read the full evalua-tion report of the SUCCESS centre, we have chosen a couple of well-formulated phrases:• “... the overall quality of the re-

search performed by the Centre is excellent and of high international calibre.”

• “Achievements of the Centre in the area of researcher training, engagement and education are excellent.”

• “... Centre is led by a visionary and highly dedicated Director, with support by two scientific leaders and an efficient administration, in addition to the WP leaders.”

Then there are some passages that are a little less over the top, but we will not list them here. (Click the image to read the full evaluation.)

Humourusly the CEERs were graded by traffic light symbols, although this special light had four colors. Three centres were given the green light, meaning that they could continue more or less as before. Four centres – among them SUCCESS – got the yellow light, indicating that there are im-provements to be made before their contracts are prolonged. None of the centres were redlighted, but one got the special orange light, symbolizing a reduced funding. The conditions set for SUCCESS are based on the evaluation panel’s recommendations, which should be answered by a plan on issues like strengthened international cooperation, better work package integration, updated innovation strategy, and better integration of the industrial partners into the centre’s research activities.

As a result of this, the over-all research plan for the three last years will have to be updated, perhaps with a new work package struc-ture. The Research Council also wants us to plan for post-period research. The evaluation results have been discussed in the centre. We find the evaluation report posi-tive and useful and are ready to use the needed resources to address the flaws that are pointed out. The first milstone in this work is to make a plan for the improvements within October 1st. Read more about the CEER evaluations here:http://www.forskningsradet.no/1253987349526 (partly in Norwegian)

The midway evaluation process of eight Centres for Environment-friendly Energy Research (CEERs) has come to a conclusion, and on June 13th SUCCESS received a letter from the Norwegian Research Council that we will – on certain conditions – have our contract prolonged with three years after the initial five year period.

Not that we like bragging ...

SUCCESSful midterm evaluation:

Yellow light means GO

Ingrid Anell reports from Longyearbyen CO2 Week

Reaching out to all agesHaving worked as a substitute teacher I know full well what to expect when you head into a class-room full of unknown students. The answer to that is: anything. I’ve met angelic classes, straight-backed with eager hands in the air. I have also spent the odd hours wrestling children down from book-cases, tear-ing scissors from their eager hands and wishing for ear-plugs. So when invited to come help teach global warming to youngsters of age 5, 9, 13 and 15, I will admit to some hesitation. Cathy Braathen, who has been in charge of the UNIS CO2 Lab’s outreach program, coordinated with the local schools to create CO2 week from April 29th to May 3rd. The classes incorporated global warming into their curriculum and several people from UNIS and Store Norske mining company were involved in various lectures, exercises and excursions during the week. While the idea behind teaching each group was ultimately the same, the approach and the amount of information varied greatly depending on the age of the children/adolescents. Most of the learning was interactive using simple tools. Among other things the children made CO2 which expanded balloons over the concoction of vinegar and baking soda, they had the chance to watch how CO2 behaves in water and even get an understanding of porosity as they experimented with rocks and water in a container.The youngest children blew bubbles,

heated a plastic box with a mini earth inside, drew pictures, and of course, watched The arctic ad-ventures of Dioxy

(the movie). Several groups also had excursions to the CO2 site and to Store Norske’s core storage lab. As a PostDoc with the CO2 Lab, my activities vary greatly. I give conference talks and host biology semi-nars, scootering trips with industry and government representatives and TV interviews. I think, however, I can safely say that the oddest moment in my career at UNIS came towards the end of the outreach week when UNIS was invaded by the children from the daycare centers for a whole day filled with activi-ties. My part to play involved pulling on a large grey velour ball, over-sized four-finger gloves and my gi-ant head-phones in an attempt to look like Dioxy, the mascot of the CO2 project! At five it is perhaps hard to understand how CO2 can cause the planet to heat and to understand why global warming is a problem. However, those of us who helped out during CO2 Week were impressed with the interest and enthusiasm we met, both from students and teachers. There were certainly many eager hands in the air and no children climbing book-cases. The questions and ideas that they had, all through the ages, pointed to insight and thoughtful-ness. It showed us all how young minds can absorb information and how the various building-blocks of knowledge come together over the years. Ingrid Anell is a SUCCESS postdoc at UNIS.

CO2 Week in Longyearbyen was sponsored by Svalbards Miljøvernfond

The youngest children out at the Store Norske core-storage site, gather to hear more about how coal is formed.

Ready to face the five-year olds – a striking resem-blance between the original Dioxy mascot and the costume design?

SUCCESS Fall Seminar October 22–23 in Oslo

Preliminary programThe SUCCESS Centre stages its traditional Fall Seminar and hopes to see a lot of you there. The keynote session and the debate are open to all interested, while the rest of the seminar is limited to SUCCESS partners and collaborators. The seminar takes place at Grand Hotel in downtown Oslo. Registration will open at the SUCCESS web page around July 1st. The below program is tentative and not com-plete.

Keynote speaker session (Tuesday)• Claus Otto, Shell Global Solutions International: A

Risk-Based Framework for Containment Monitoring – Examples from Shell's CCS Projects

• Andrea Ramirez Ramirez, Utrecht University: CO2 storage: at the end of the CCS chain but at the core of CCS optimization

• Volker Oye, Norsar: Risk of leakages from caprock cracking – detection and analysis from micro earth-quakes

• Kaare Helle, DNV: CCS costs compared to other low carbon technologies and the international market

• Robert Finley, Illinois State Geological Survey: A Successful Demonstration of Saline Reservoir Carbon Storage at a Biofuel Facility at Decatur, Illinois, USA

TED session (Tuesday)Students and junior researchers of SUCCESS and col-laborating projects present their work in five minutes of popular presentation

Mingling and dinner (Tuesday)

SUCCESS in-depth session (Wednesday)• Laila Reigstad: Monitoring the seafloor – a multi-

disciplinary task• Alvar Braathen: Longyearbyen CO2 Lab – from pilot

study to demo project• More to come

Politics sessionPanel debate: What are we waiting for? Is the CCS tech-nology immature, or is it the lack of profits that is holding us back? Should the state intervene with full strength, or is it possible to have a functioning market? (The debate will be in Norwegian.)

Confirmed panel participants: Nikolai Astrup (H), member of the Parliament standing committee on energy and environmentEirin Sund (A), member of the Parliament standing com-mittee on energy and environmentStein Lier-Hansen, director general Federation of Nor-wegian IndustriesKari Elisabeth Kaski, department head Petroleum and Industry, Zero Emission Resource Organisation

Moderator: Arvid Nøttvedt, SUCCESS

Panel members: Astrup, Sund, Lier-Hansen and Kaski. (Photos by respective organizations.)

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SUCCESS Outreach School

Can researchers be good storytellers?The idea of the SUCCESS Outreach School is to give our young scientists inspiration, tools and methods they can utilize to reach across with their results and to describe their work to an audience. A final result, after joint work-shops in March and two rounds of individual coaching, will be a five minute long popular science presentation of their work at the Fall Seminar in October 2013. Two workshops were held in March in con-nection with the SUCCESS Winter Seminar.Marianne Nødtvedt Knudsen (M.Sc. drama pedagogy and working as a music teacher, a free-lance drama teacher, director and actor) focused on teambuilding through theater games. Furthermore, a coaching team for Christian Michelsen Research from Researchers Grand Prix in Bergen challenged the participants to make scientific results into fun and interesting stories by utilizing creativity. The target group could be your little son and daughter or just the interested public.

Later on there has been a first round of indi-vidual coaching in Oslo and in Bergen. A second round will be held in September before the Grand Finale at the Fall Seminar in October! At the picture SUCCESS/INJECT PhD student Rohaldin Miri from UiO explains his work during the individual coaching in Oslo.

ECCSEL is a European consortium on Carbon Capture and Storage that aims to develop a dis-tributed, integrated research infrastructure. Nor-way is a main financial contributor, and hopefully Norwegian institutions will get their fair share of high-tec gear. So far Norway has been represented by the Research Council (Climit) and SINTEF, but at a seminar in May it was decided to build a Norwegian node of interested institutions.

The next call for funding is expected to take place in mid-2014 and will hopefully let the pro-jects compete for several hundred million NOK. So far, a national reference group based on the national CO2 storage community has been established. Harald Johansen from IFE has been appointed contact person from SUCCESS to look closer into a GAP analysis made in the project. Read more at http://www.eccsel.org/.

The SUCCESS centre wishes all our readers a bubbling summer

SUCCESS workshop in October

Learnings from a full-scale projectIn conjunction with the SUCCESS centre, the US-based Midwest Geological Sequestration Consor-tium (MGSC) will conduct a two-day intensive workshop on lessons learned from the Illinois Basin – Decatur Project (IBDP). IBDP is a 1-mil-lion tonne saline reservoir carbon dioxide storage demonstration in Decatur, Illinois. The workshop will take place in Oslo and is tentatively set to October 24th and 25th, i.e. im-mideately after the SUCCESS Fall Seminar. It will be an intensive exploration of CCS project devel-opment and operations. The experienced team of course instructors including Dr. Robert Finley, Dr. Sallie Greenberg, and Schlumberger Carbon Ser-vices specialists will provide presentations, panel discussions, and interactive experiences based on current research results at IBPD. Through this knowledge-sharing event, partici-pants will gain a clear understanding of all aspects of a working carbon capture and storage site. An opening plenary frames the global CCS context while bringing focus to success at the project lev-

el. Dr. Finley will present an IBPD project over-view followed by individual sessions to engage participants in greater understanding of geologic site characterization, surface facility development, deep and shallow monitoring, verification and accounting, geophysics, modeling, public engage-ment, and CCS regulations. IBDP is led by the Illinois State Geological Survey, Archer Daniels Midland Company, and Schlumberger Carbon Services through funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. IBPD is among the first large-scale onshore demonstrations to confirm that carbon dioxide emissions can be stored in deep underground reservoirs. To-date, more than 500,000 tonnes of CO2 have been stored at the IBDP. The workshop is primarily open for members of the SUCCESS Consortium, but requests from other interested parties will of course be consid-ered. More info about the workshop will be avail-able on the SUCCESS web site in mid-August.

Robert J. Finley turns the main valve to start injection of CO2 into the Mount Simon Sandstone. (Photo by Daniel Byers, ISGS.) Finley is the Director of the Advanced Energy Technology Initiative at the Illinois State Geologi-cal Survey (ISGS), Champaign, Illinois. He is currently leading the Midwest Geological Sequestration Consor-

tium (MGSC), aimed at addressing concerns with global climate change.

Sallie Greenberg is the Sequestration Communications Coordinator for ISGS and MGSC. She is Assistant Direc-tor for the Advanced Energy Technology Initiative.

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.

IMPACT Project MeetingThe second project meeting of our collaborating project IMPACT was held at Uni CIPR on April 18th. In addition to the sponsors of the pro-ject, most of the partners participated. Philip Ringrose and Sveinung Hagen from Statoil and Aage Stangeland from the CLIMIT Program at the Research Council of Norway were representatives of our sponsors in the meeting. Ivar Avatsmark was invited and participated on behalf of SUCCESS. Eight scientific presentations were presented by different partners in the meeting. The meeting was summed up by a very fruitful discussion on the results and different research activities. One of the important comments was to work on a better integration between IMPACT and SUCCESS, specifically to use our new understandings in geology and geomechanics (IMPACT) in models that deal with flow simulation (SUCCESS). This needs a better communication between the two projects and will defi-nitely result in more practical and realistic models in future. IMPACT web page: http://org.uib.no/cipr/Project/IMPACT/

In May the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC) launched a new report that examines the challenges that must be ad-dressed to secure CCS as a viable component of strategies to mitigate climate change, and consequently to consider what contribution it may make in Europe to 2050. The report has been prepared by a working group consisting of around twenty international experts, one being SUCCESS Scientific Leader Per Aagaard of UiO. On storage issues, the report recommens that a «strong focus be placed on activities to accelerate confidence building on the perma-nence and safety of CO2 storage, including clarifying and elaborating regulatory frameworks, and fast-tracking several storage facilities through the complete regulatory process to minimise associated uncer-tainties as the volumes of stored CO2 accumulate. The demonstration plants are essential to provide data at large scale and should be de-veloped as soon as possible. They should be complemented by more pilot-scale injection test sites, perhaps five or six in total, which may be able to be implemented and deliver useful results on shorter time-scales.» You may read the full report or a brief summary at http://www.easac.eu/home/reports-and-statements/detail-view/article/easac-report.html.

New international report on CCS

Per Aagaard at the launching event

Alvar on the moveProfessor Alvar Braathen, who has been one of SUCCESS’ senior researchers at the Uni-versity Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), from June 1st holds a professor position at the Uni-versity of Oslo, which means he will still be an important fig-ure in our centre.