Carbon Capture and Storage

As part of the "Anglo-French scientific discussion seminars" spanning all domains of science, the Science and Technology Department of the French Embassy in the UK was pleased to organise the seminar « Carbon Capture and Storage : general overview and future developments... »

This seminar was given by Dr Jon Gibbins, Imperial College London, Pr Martin Downie, University of Newcastle, and Dr Mihn Ha-Duong, Centre International de Recherche sur l’Environnement et le Développement (CIRED), Nogent-sur-Marne.

The three presentations are available on this website

While climate change has been recognized as a real threat for the humankind, many measures and targets are proposed by EU-members, in order to reduce the amount of CO2 in the power sector. Therefore, most of these countries want to concentrate themselves on renewable energy of energy efficiency. However, another solution could enable us to go on with the exploitation of fossil resources like coal (particularly for the emerging countries) : the Carbon Capture and Storage process.

This technology, which consists in capturing CO2 before or after the combustion and in injecting in deep reservoirs, is not very difficult to develop for researchers, but its deployment cannot occur without some governmental guarantees, a clear regulatory frame and the acceptation of people.

Dr Gibbins gave us a short description of the existing technologies, the current research projects and technical barriers in UK. Dr Ha-Duong provided us an analysis of the socio-economic constraints around the introduction of CCS. Finally Pr Downie talked about the technical and economical issues raised by the transportation step of CO2 between the power plant and the reservoir.

The three presentations are attached below:

DR. Gibbins’ presentation

Dr Ha-Duong’s presentation