Learning through a portfolio of carbon capture and storage demonstration projects

Carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology is considered by many to be an essential route to meet climate mitigation targets in the power and industrial sectors. Deploying CCS technologies globally will first require a portfolio of large-scale demonstration projects. These first projects should assist learning by diversity, learning by replication, de-risking the technologies and developing viable business models. From 2005 to 2009, optimism about the pace of CCS rollout led to mutually independent efforts in the European Union, North America and Australia to assemble portfolios of projects. Since 2009, only a few of these many project proposals remain viable, but the initial rationales for demonstration have not been revisited in the face of changing circumstances. Here I argue that learning is now both more difficult and more important given the slow pace of deployment. Developing a more coordinated global portfolio will facilitate learning across projects and may determine whether CCS ever emerges from the demonstration phase. Economic models deem rapid wide-scale deployment of CCS in the next few years to be essential in restraining the costs of meeting the 2 °C target for global temperature1,2, but CCS technologies are still at the pilot and demonstration phase. Paradoxically, it is primarily the costs of the early demonstration projects that have hampered further deployment. As each CCS ‘demonstration’ plant costs on the order of US$1 billion, during a time of fiscal austerity it has proved difficult to justify public support. Near-term pressure to develop CCS has also eased as most countries found it easier to meet their Kyoto targets because of the economic crisis (and other factors such as the US shale gas revolution). Meanwhile, unlocking private financing remains elusive and depends on developing necessary legal, institutional and commercial frameworks, as well as significant cost reductions and de-risking that can only come from operating multiple plants3. Difficulties in justifying pilot and demonstration plants or deployment policy are hardly restricted to CCS, and can be found for nuclear power, renewables and indeed virtually any novel technology4,5, but the emphasis on demonstration is most common in the process industries6. At its broadest, CCS ‘demonstration’ has been identified as having a dozen or more manifestations, ranging from discourse creation to coalition formation7. I acknowledge the many important dimensions of demonstration, indeed, different disciplines have radically different conceptions of the nature of demonstration6. Given the overwhelming government and industry focus on cost reduction8,9, however, I use this as a test of how learning is operationalized. Governments should at least be able to construct a portfolio of projects along the dimension that they deem as central to the enterprise of demonstration. The technical rationales for demonstrations being large-scale include understanding power system reliability and performance10 and adequately characterizing each geological formation11. As large-scale projects must store roughly 1 million tCO2 per year10,11, this scale requirement poses a number of challenges when seeking to learn from multiple projects. In this Perspective, I explore the history of CCS demonstration in an effort to understand how the initial optimism about large-scale rollout led to multiple, uncoordinated efforts to learn from diversity. In the absence of widespread deployment of CCS, the projects that have endured do not form a coherent programme aimed at learning. Going forward, therefore, any effort to successfully re-launch CCS at scale will need to revisit the fundamental case for demonstration, including how best to derive the most learning from the billions of dollars already invested and that will need to be invested in the next wave of projects. There is a need for greater clarity over what time frame, at what scale, at what cost and to what end CCS demonstration is being pursued

Economics and politics of shale gas in Europe

In the wake of the dramatic growth in shale gas production in the United States, interest in shale gas exploration in Europe has been driven primarily by concerns over industrial competitiveness and energy security. A number of studies have been carried out to understand the success factors underpinning the US shale gas revolution and how this success could be replicated in Europe. Most of these studies focus on the macroeconomic and energy market impact of a possible shale gas production in Europe. These studies are in general sceptical about the prospects of shale gas development relative to other gas supply options to Europe. By considering the other options available in greater detail and exploring the stochastic nature of shale gas exploration and production as they apply to production economics, we conclude that this scepticism may be overstated. Apart from political opposition that has shut down shale gas exploration in a number of European member states because of concerns over environmental risks, in some countries notably the UK, the combination of political support and a large, liberalised gas market may offer at least a plausible case for shale gas production. To properly assess the potential for shale gas though, a more rigorous, probabilistic analysis of the associated production economics will need to be carried out

Evolution in inter-firm governance along the transport biofuel value chain in maritime Silk Road countries

We investigate how value chain governance can evolve in the transport biofuel sector beyond logistics and operations optimization, drawing on cases of eighteen manufacturers in four Belt and Road countries. We find that key motivations for vertical integration include control of strategic factors such as security of supply and gaining access to the retail market, subject to inter-institutional and intra-organizational barriers. We contribute to a theory of governance mode selection by suggesting plural governance mode offers a key strategic choice under institutional constraints. In BRI countries, plural mode could be less disruptive when integrating value chains.ESRC-Cambridge Commonwealth Trust-Dorothy Hodgkin Postgraduate Awar

Evaluating gaps in knowledge, willingness and heating performance in individual preferences on household energy and climate policy: evidence from the UK

This study investigates the knowledge-willingness, willingness-performance, and knowledge-performance gaps regarding reducing carbon dioxide emissions and emerging technologies of the 2137 British residents. Household's heating sources and heat settings are anticipated as key criteria for evaluating respondents' performances. The study revealed more than 80% of respondents have a good knowledge regarding climate change and carbon issues. The study found a smaller gap in knowledge versus willingness as 59%, 87%, 88% and 85% of respondents want to use bioenergy, afforestation/reforestation, solar and wind for their future energy sources. The Multinomial logit regression (MNLR) investigates that incrementing good and very good knowledge index increases the odds of a high willingness to save energy by 33% and 6%, respectively. The willingness versus performance study identified 96% as claiming to be more likely energy savers, whereas, in reality, 52% of them never or rarely took basic measures like setting their heating system to turn off. Despite having a good and very good knowledge index, the knowledge versus performance appears, 75% of respondents are using gas boilers and gas central heating. Policymakers and the research community need to develop comprehensive plans by taking these wider social issues to meet net-zero targets. Employing smart building principles, lowering the installation costs of the new smart technologies, awarding and encouraging the energy saver, setting individual carbon footprint limits, and training and empowering household representatives to select better energy for houses could popularise the emission reduction technologies in the UK.Fortumin Foundation provided financial support as a grant to TK to visit Cambridge and carry out the research. The grant number was 201800255. The YouGov survey was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant EP/P02614/

Direct air capture: process technology, techno-economic and socio-political challenges

Climate change mitigation scenarios that meet the Paris Agreement's objective of limiting global warming usually assume an important role for carbon dioxide removal and negative emissions technologies. Direct air capture (DAC) is a carbon dioxide removal technology which separates CO2 directly from the air using an engineered system. DAC can therefore be used alongside other negative emissions technologies, in principle, to mitigate CO2 emissions from a wide variety of sources, including those that are mobile and dispersed. The ultimate fate of the CO2, whether it is stored, reused, or utilised, along with choices related to the energy and materials inputs for a DAC process, dictates whether or not the overall process results in negative emissions. In recent years, DAC has undergone significant technical development, with commercial entities now operating in the market and prospects for significant upscale. Here we review the state-of-the-art to provide clear research challenges across the process technology, techno-economic and socio-political domains

Peeling back the label – exploring sustainable palm oil ecolabelling and consumption in the United Kingdom

Palm oil production has been linked to deforestation, biodiversity loss, and climate change. We explore consumer awareness of palm oil, perceptions of its environmental impact, recognition of ecolabels including the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) ecolabel, and inclusion or avoidance of ecolabels in household shopping using a representative sample of the British population. We find consumer awareness of palm oil to be fairly high (77%), with 41% of those aware of palm oil perceiving it as "environmentally unfriendly," more than double the level of any other vegetable oil examined. However, recognition of the RSPO ecolabel is the same as those who "recognize" a fictitious ecolabel, making recognition indistinguishable from zero. Based on our logistic regression analysis, members of the British population most likely to actively include ecolabelled products in their weekly household shopping are those who are female, from higher socioeconomic groups, spend more than £120 per week on household shopping, and have received a Bachelors degree or higher. Despite clear benefits of environmental certification and ecolabelling, a relatively niche segment of the general population actively includes ecolabelled products in their weekly household shopping. Therefore, we recommend current policies be amended to require companies to source 100% identity preserved certified palm oil that can be traced to the plantation level to avoid having to rely on consumer decisions to enable a shift towards more responsibly-sourced palm oil. Additionally, requiring multinational companies to map and publicly disclose full supply chain information for all global operations, including palm oil suppliers and existing concessions, could help illuminate and discourage unsustainable practices

Political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental dimensions of electric vehicle adoption in the United States: a social-media interaction analysis

Many governments have begun to adopt aggressive targets for electric vehicles. However, studies of the drivers of electric vehicle (EV) adoption are scarce. Social media interactions can provide a new data-driven vantage point to explore such drivers. This study uses data from 36,000 public posts on Facebook to investigate intersectionality in EV-communication as per the Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental (PESTLE) categories. A computational social science methodology was adopted using a mixed-method application of social network analysis and machine learning-based topic modelling through Latent Dirichlet Allocation algorithm on a 600,000-text corpus extracted from the Facebook posts. Results showed that political, economic, and legal posts had dense clusters around the technology policy of EV, the institutional discourse of electrification of the federal vehicle fleet, and tax and credit framework politics. The environmental and social dimensions had a higher discourse for social justice, clean air, and better health and well-being. A market shift towards EV as a service industry was observed in the technology and economics-related posts. These findings can help policymakers, and planners design contextualised energy policy for influencing EV adoption in the U.S. and other countries.This study is in parts supported by Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation under the grant number [OPP1144] through the Gates Cambridge Scholarship; Energy Transition Small Grant 2020 by the Isaac Newton Trust; and the Winter Fellowship – 2020 by the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum (MiCEF), awarded to RD at the University of Cambridge

Fifteen new risk loci for coronary artery disease highlight arterial-wall-specific mechanisms

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although 58 genomic regions have been associated with CAD thus far, most of the heritability is unexplained, indicating that additional susceptibility loci await identification. An efficient discovery strategy may be larger-scale evaluation of promising associations suggested by genome-wide association studies (GWAS). Hence, we genotyped 56,309 participants using a targeted gene array derived from earlier GWAS results and performed meta-analysis of results with 194,427 participants previously genotyped, totaling 88,192 CAD cases and 162,544 controls. We identified 25 new SNP-CAD associations (P < 5 × 10(-8), in fixed-effects meta-analysis) from 15 genomic regions, including SNPs in or near genes involved in cellular adhesion, leukocyte migration and atherosclerosis (PECAM1, rs1867624), coagulation and inflammation (PROCR, rs867186 (p.Ser219Gly)) and vascular smooth muscle cell differentiation (LMOD1, rs2820315). Correlation of these regions with cell-type-specific gene expression and plasma protein levels sheds light on potential disease mechanisms