Susan:

Tell me about the Catalogue – what is it and what are the resources it provides?

Sylvain:

The basic idea is that there is a lot of information out there in the scientific literature about CO2 storage resources. But it is difficult for non CCUS specialists to understand what is meant by these resources because many different evaluators have provided different numbers for the same geological formations. We felt it was necessary to provide clarity, transparency on how to classify these resources, to provide an insight both on what is the scale of the resources and on how ready are we to physically store CO2 into these geological formations.

Susan:

What were the most interesting things you found pulling in all this data together from around the world?

Sylvain:

The very good news, which is well known by the CCUS community, is that there is a wealth of resources on the scale needed to tackle climate change. What we also found is that many resources evaluations do not clearly state how these resources can be implemented –how many wells, what type of infrastructure, what timeframe is needed to inject these volumes?

We use the SRMS, the storage resource management system, developed by the Society of Petroleum Engineers in 2017 to shed light on commercial readiness. The SRMS says there are a series of questions you should be asking yourself when you make an evaluation.

The first question is, can this resource be considered as discovered? Another question is, can it be commercial? Is there a regulatory framework in this country? Is it physically accessible? And then another question is, is the owner ready to take an investment decision on this resource? And then basically we call it capacity when we are ready to take an investment decision. It’s like a gate process where you have a series of steps in order to make sure the resource can be implemented based on a specified project description.

Susan:

Who actually pulls the data together for the Catalogue – it’s not OGCI right?

Sylvain:

We decided to reclassify public evaluations, meaning things you can search on public databases, scientific journals, or websites. For us it’s important that any people analyzing, reviewing the Catalogue can know precisely how and when this was established, and by which authors.

An evaluation team from Pale Blue Dot Energy works together with the Global CCS Institute to classify these public assessments according to the SRMS before posting them on the Catalogue.

Susan:

The IEA recently published a net zero report saying that 10 heavy industrial plants would need to be equipped with carbon capture technology every month from 2030. Are we building up to that? And will storage be a constraint to that or is storage really going to be an enabler to getting to that scale that fast?

Sylvain:

This is indeed a challenge. The CCUS industry is not developing fast enough and there are a series of hurdles. Within OGCI we try to solve these gaps. We felt this CO2 storage resource maturity mapping was and it is still a gap. And we hope this challenge is resolved thanks to the Catalogue.

Susan:

Are we at an inflection point for CCUS? The technology has been around for decades, but now we’re seeing lots of interest, coverage, and action. What’s magical about now?

Sally:

The key difference is that about five years ago, the concept of net zero came along; the idea that we actually needed to eliminate all emissions. And if we’re going to do that, CCUS is an absolutely critical technology, and the world’s woken up to that.

We see it really at the centerpiece of the discussion of a comprehensive strategy for getting to net zero. And I’ve been involved in this area for, gosh more than 20 years, and I’ve been on all the ups and downs, the roller coaster of carbon capture and storage, but I think there’s a new earnestness, and we all realize it’s time to get going. We’ve got to get moving, and this is a critical piece of the technology.

Susan:

So it’s not just that Elon Musk just tweeted about it in early January?

Sally:

No, there are policy incentives, for example, where I live in California, we have a low carbon fuel standard that says that if you can capture and store CO₂, that there is a credit that you can use to comply with that standard. We have tax credits in the United States that are getting a lot of attention.

So it’s deep, and it’s broad, and it’s wide. And what is so thrilling about having Elon Musk and actually all the tech companies jumping in is it says that they’re going to need this too. And that’s a real shift in the narrative.

Susan:

We’ve started to hear people talk about the need for the industry to be as big in 2050 as oil and gas is today. Is that hyperbole or is it actually going to become that large an industry?

Sally:

Global modelling studies suggest that we’re going to need to capture and store anywhere between 5-10 billion tonnes per year of carbon dioxide. To put that in perspective, we emit about 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide today, so anywhere from 10% to 20% of global emissions. And if you think about that, that is on the scale of the oil and gas industry today. So no, it’s not hyperbole at all. Now some of that might be captured directly from the atmosphere, we might use bioenergy plus CCS, but that’s a very reasonable statement.

Susan:

We see policies playing a pivotal role, but what other actions can governments take to support and to drive projects?

Sally:

For a typical CCS project in the US, you might be dealing with 10 different agencies who have some kind of jurisdiction over the project, in addition to the federal government. For a project developer, you see all these overlapping permits, and it’s pretty overwhelming.

So, if the state and federal and local entities could work together to create a process where there was coordination amongst those agencies, that would be extremely beneficial. Ideally, even one agency could play the role of the lead – really stewarding these projects through a pipeline. And this would be particularly important for these early projects where everybody is still in the learning mode.

Susan:

Why are companies like Microsoft, Apple or Amazon, looking at this technology?

Sally:

The tech companies have been working on reducing their emissions for quite a long time. As they make progress, they are now looking to how are they going to contribute to reducing the emissions of all the products that they use as part of their business.

They realize that directly going after those with the tools that they use to reduce their own emissions may not work. People use a lot of concrete. People use a lot of paper. People use a lot of steel. Well, how can you get rid of those emissions associated with manufacturing? Carbon dioxide capture and storage is a great way to do that. In addition, some are starting to think about net negative emissions to try to reduce past emissions.

Susan:

What is this World Bank satellite programme that the Payne Institute is working on, and how does it actually work?

Morgan:

We’re talking about what we call the VIIRS Nightfire product – a visible infrared imaging radiometer suite. It is a NASA and NOAA instrument that is currently flying on two different satellites. Each one of these instruments costs about $1 billion and they were originally designed as weather prediction. They have a daily and nightly global coverage, about a one kilometer spatial resolution, and each does 14 orbits of the earth every day. We focus on the nighttime data.

The work we do on flaring is used by the World Bank, for their Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, which is a global partnership looking to reduce routine flaring. But there are also a host of other users from companies to consultancies, to researchers who use the flaring data. So we get that data about four hours after it is taken from the satellite, and then we use algorithms to clean and come up with the product that estimates total flaring.

Susan:

How much data is it? If it has 14 passes every day for two satellites on 23 spectral bonds, that just feels like a ginormous amount of data.

Morgan:

That’s right. It takes considerable expertise and experience just to handle that kind of data as well as almost two decades of experience in coming up with and refining the algorithms that can take that multispectral data and turn it into a product that means something to someone. In other words, how we get a proxy for the total amount of gas flared on the planet every night.

Susan:

What’s the latency to get it in a form that can get used?

Morgan:

We process it on a daily basis and that’s part of the project we’re working with OGCI on, to come up with user-friendly ways to access this data. Currently, it is released on an open access basis with a six month delay. We’re working with OGCI to make the daily data more accessible to non-technical people – to journalists and to those companies and institutions that do not have a data processing or data science skill set.

Susan:

So it’s going to go from six months to daily?

Morgan:

Yes. Right now, most of the data that we put out, say, for the World Bank is just aggregated on an annual basis. So it will be considerably more detailed or at least accessible on a quicker basis.

Susan:

In terms of making sure the data is accurate, I understand that the OGCI member companies are going to help calibrate that so you can get some additional third-party data to make sure that those 15,000 to 16,000 flares correspond to actual facilities?

 Morgan:

Over the last many years, we have used different ways to calibrate our estimates from the satellite data to the reality of what’s happening on the ground. Our hope is that the OGCI support will help with further calibration from different facilities and maybe more facilities or different kinds of facilities, as well as helping to check our numbers against what we’re seeing on the ground at their facilities.

Susan:

So, once we get the data accessible, clear, translated from big data to something more actionable, what’s the best case in terms of action that will result from this?

 Morgan:

I think it’s going to be used by both investors and regulators, as well as companies. Once you have a formal regulatory requirement, then there’s obviously a need to measure or show the outputs. And so that’s one place you’ll see that.

We’re seeing a lot of interest in how to access this data for ESG reporting at both the company level and financial level. Companies are trying to differentiate themselves in terms of things like responsible natural gas and low emissions along the supply chain. You’re also seeing much more pressure from shareholder activists and financial institutions themselves, as well as, of course, the wider community, environmental community, and communities that live close to these operations.

Flaring is the most visible part of emissions and we can see it from space – so you can certainly see it from next door. And that pressure is going to lead to the need for more data and measuring.

Susan:

I’ve always understood that Saudi Arabia saw climate change as a threat to the underlying elements of its economy. But I get the sense that this view is changing. Could you talk about that shift?

Tidjani:

Climate is a particular challenge for countries with a significant endowment of fossil fuel reserves, because they aim to valorize those natural resources as part of their development agenda.

Susan:

One of the key takeaways of the OGCI report on CCUS in Saudi Arabia is the potential to export low carbon products – how does that work?

Tidjani:

CCS can help decarbonize many industries, including cement, steel, chemicals, and oil and gas, in addition to the power and desalination sectors. So all these projects when decarbonized through CCS become low carbon products that can be exported to other countries.

To demonstrate one of the key low-carbon products, Saudi Aramco, in collaboration with SABIC and Japan, demonstrated the blue ammonia supply chain. The project started by producing hydrogen from natural gas, capturing the CO₂ from this process. Then the CO₂-free hydrogen was utilized to produce ammonia which is being shipped to Japan to be used for power generation. It’s one of the many example that really demonstrate how we can combine CCS with hydrocarbon resources to produce zero CO₂ emission products such as hydrogen or ammonia.

Susan:

Do you ever see a time when Saudi Arabia would be an exporter of low carbon steel and cement?

Tidjani:

There is no project that captures CO₂ from steel in Saudi Arabia now, but our neighbour, the United Arab Emirates has the largest CO₂ capture from a steel plant. So those type of business models or technologies will definitely come on stream in the future globally, and also in Saudi Arabia I hope.

Capturing CO₂ from natural gas plant, from ammonia plant, from hydrogen plant is cost effective, and also very simple compared to capturing CO₂ from refineries where you have multiple sources of CO₂ being emitted, or from a cement plant. But we will need all these technologies to decarbonize using CCS, and costs will definitely go down as we build more and more plant.

Susan:

CCS has been around for decades. So what has held this technology back from the scale and impact it could have?

Tidjani:

What is different now is the global momentum we are witnessing for scaling up CCS. This is mainly because there is a growing recognition by many countries that net zero emissions is almost impossible without CCS. Also some leading policies, like 45Q in the US have demonstrated their effectiveness. So the oil and gas industry, also through the OGCI, is taking concrete actions.

So this is really exciting, but the challenge remains quite huge. The CCUS industry is going to have to be at the scale of the global oil and gas industry – capturing and storing around one gigatonne of CO₂ by 2030 – to have the kind of impact it needs.

Susan:

How much potential is there for the costs of these projects to reduce? Is this going to be like solar and wind where you’ve seen costs drop by 80%, 90% over a 10 or 20 year period?

Tidjani:

Well, that’s an excellent question because climate is not only about ambition, it’s about also urgency. We have to do many different things in the next decade to be on track for delivering on the Paris Agreement. So CCUS costs will have to decline very rapidly and significantly. The good news is that the technology is proven and new concepts are emerging such as CCUS hubs, where the CO2 transport and storage infrastructure is shared between different emitters, bringing down significantly the cost through economies of scale. But we need to be on the similar curve of what has happened in solar and wind energy if we hope to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

Susan:

Let’s start with the basics. What is the Northern Lights project, and how’s it going to help accelerate decarbonization?

Martijn:

So Northern Lights is an industrial scale offshore CO2 storage facility, which is linked with a ship-based transport solution. It provides a solution for European industrials, where we collect their captured CO2 and store it in Norway. We are currently building this facility. In the first phase, it will collect one-and-a-half million tons on the onshore facility side, and we are already scaling the offshore part, the pipeline and the permanent geological storage to 5 million tons per year.

We’re trying to set up a new value chain and business model that should allow all the European countries to reach their climate goals and the individual companies to reach their net zero targets. So it’s a new market, and we are extremely excited about it.

Susan:

When is this going to be in operation? When are you going to start putting CO2 in storage?

Martijn:

The current construction project will be operational in 2024. We have a 100 kilometers pipeline going offshore. And then, it’s 2.5 kilometers down under the sea bed. And the sea is, at that location, is 300 meters deep actually. So we’re not going to install a platform, it will all be a submarine solution on the sea bed. And we collect power etc from nearby offshore oil and gas platforms.

Susan:

This project is open source. Can you talk about what that means in this context?

Martijn:

We are supporting two industrials from Norway itself supported by the Norwegian government. It’s a waste-to-power facility and a cement factory close to Oslo in the east of Norway. We have ships collecting the CO2 there, and then sending to the west coast of Norway, 600 kilometers, where we offload the CO2 and then inject it offshore.

We are building spare capacity, so we will have additional ships that will collect the CO2 from anywhere in Europe. If there is an offloading jetty at the port facilities, we can pick it up and then inject it in Norway. Some countries don’t have good geology or easy access for a pipeline solution, and this ship-based solution provides a solution for industrials to access the Norwegian Continental Shelf.
We are convinced that without CCS, we’ll never reach climate targets, and we need to get going, quite frankly. Once we start, on our side, we will be able to reduce the costs, as we learn and as we find ways to do things faster and better. At the same time, we see that more and more countries in the European Union, the ETS price and national taxations on CO2 are increasing.

So we are convinced there will be a commercial business model, supporting the CCS going forward. But we’re not there yet, to be honest, we’re not there yet.

Susan:

Last week you signed an agreement with Climeworks, the Swiss company that does direct air capture about exploring, installing a direct air capture plant in Western Norway close to the terminus for the offshore storage. How does direct air capture interact with the model that you’ve got?

Martijn:

That is a collaboration we are extremely enthusiastic about. Direct air capture basically means that you take the CO2 directly out of the atmosphere and that you inject it. This is, in our view, the future because we are talking about reducing emissions all the time, but did we actually reach the climate targets? At the end of the day, we need to go to negative emissions.

Susan:

So what exactly are natural climate solutions, and can you give a tangible example?

Viviana:

Natural climate solutions are when we make projects to enhance the capabilities of nature, with the specific purpose of tackling climate change. When you restore forests, for example, the forest grows and it takes carbon from the atmosphere to do so. But it also protects communities from weather events and even from climate change itself. So the concept of natural climate solutions is doingit deliberately – having projects that use the capabilities of nature to tackle climate change.

Susan:

How does NCS fit into the portfolio of the OGCI members in terms of de-carbonization actions?

Viviana:

Some companies actively operate in NCS markets. Other companies do voluntary projects for NCS as an extra contribution, but they don’t really take it into their climate targets. But as OGCI members, we have an agreement that it is a complementary lever to the decarbonization of the energy value chain.

Susan:

OGCI published a paper on NCS recently. Can you talk through the main issues that are covered there?

Viviana:

It says that it must be complementary. It also states that we support very high level and very high quality NCS. Because the trick about NCS is, that if you do a bad project that doesn’t consult with the local people or take care about biodiversity or water, it does retain carbon, but it doesn’t have all the other benefitsthat are involved. So in our position paper, we make it very clear that when we talk NCS, we are talking about high integrity NCS that really takes care of all the safeguards.

Susan:

There’ve been a lot of developments around measurement, whether it’s satellites or on the ground, soil measurements, sensors. Can you talk about the role of some of these technologies in terms of addressing questions of trust and integrity?

Viviana:

You have to have sound, robust monitoring and verification systems. To becredible it used to require a lot of people in the ground, people that go there and measure the trees. And it was a barrier, it was expensive, it was difficult to demonstrate.

The evolution of remote sensing, artificial intelligence and all of these technologies that OGCI wants to support gives more capabilities for us to address the issues that have historically undermined the trust in NCS. Because a lot of people get concerned on leakage or permanence.

Susan:

What do you mean by permanence?

Viviana:

Let’s imagine that you have a project planting a forest or restoring a mangrove, but then two years later it burns down or is cut. How can you address that? One way is something like an insurance. If your project is managed to have a hundred tons of carbon, you only consider 80 and the 20 tons is reserves if any of the projects has a problem. We really believe projects need to have the highest possible level of verification for these markets to operate.

Susan:

For natural climate solutions to meet this amazing impact and potential, collaboration has got to be a critical component of this, right?

Viviana:

Yes, it is one of those issues that really requires collaboration. Oil and gas is clearly not central, in the sense NCS involves other sectors, like forestry and agriculture. So, the way we work is in full collaboration. We have taken a lot of time
to listen to people, really engaging to understand what is it that OGCI can do to helpthis grow responsibly.

Susan:

Why is it that OGCI decided to develop and publish these policy positions – and why now?

Paul:

What we’re trying to do is amplify the effectiveness of our mission. We remain focused on action and delivery, but we believe that policy can help us to accelerate action. And so it’s important for us to communicate as clearly as we can to policy makers, what we need. This year, with COP26 in Glasgow, is the perfect year to do this – both through our own governments nationally and internationally.

Susan:

How do we know if these policy papers are going to have impact or if they’re useful?

Kevin:

We see and hear in our engagement with policymakers around the world, that they are looking for industry to step forward, both in terms of action, but also in terms of using our voice. This challenge is only going to be met through collaboration between industry, policymakers, and civil society.

At the end of the day, governments set the rules of the road and the framework conditions in which we can make investments and take the actions that Paul was talking about. But they need support, and they need signals from the business community that what they’re thinking of proposing in terms of regulation and policies is going to work.

I think we as industry, and as a large representative group of the oil and gas industry, can really show good faith and signal our support for policies that we think are important to achieving the goals of rapid de-carbonization.

Susan:

So how did OGCI pick the topics for these papers?

Kevin:

Some of them are perennial policy issues that need to be addressed such as carbon value. But others are specific to what we see as an opportunity this year to really have constructive input into the process that governments are going through as they put together their NDCs.

The five issues we focused on were really in the sweet spot between items that are high consequence in terms of making a difference in the fight against climate change, but also those where we feel like we have agency.

Susan:

Kevin, you led the paper on carbon value – we usually talk about carbon price, so why is the focus here on value?

Kevin:

There are legitimate arguments in favour of seeing carbon dioxide as an externality that the market needs to solve for. But I think that there are also ways of seeing carbon emissions as an opportunity to create a new kind of carbon economy. There is a good argument that if you ascribe a value to carbon and you can find uses for that carbon, whether it’s through storage or through other uses, recycling carbon and transforming it into usable products, then the carbon itself can be seen as having a value, not just as something that needs to be priced away.

So we do recognize that market mechanisms such as carbon taxes or emissions trading programs, the kinds of things that we see in Europe now, are legitimate ways to think about this challenge, but there are also other non-market based or implicit valuation approaches, which can also lead to a reduction in carbon dioxide emitted to the air, but that might see a different end use or a different destination for that carbon.

Susan:

Paul, it’s probably very different to work at policy at a single company like bp, where you are Head of Global Policy now, and to work on developing a policy with a consortium of 12 companies, all with different governance structures?

Paul:

It is quite difficult to reach agreement, not just on public policy positions, but on many issues to do with the energy transition, climate change, and action within the OGCI. Because as you say, each company is coming from quite a different perspective and from a different place in the oil and gas world. But actually, I think those different ingredients are what make for an interesting mix and lead to some quite innovative and interesting ideas and proposals.

I think there is real power in consensus in the sense that policy makers can be confident that they’re hearing not just from one company. They’re hearing from at least 12 companies. So policy makers can be pretty confident, both at a national and international level, that they can move forward on the basis of support from 30% of the oil and gas industry, if they choose to follow some of our recommendations. And I think that’s pretty powerful.

Susan:

Why is it so important to make this switch from engineering calculations to empirical observations in measuring methane emissions?

Steven:

The engineering calculation approach has been very inaccurate with respect to the actual emissions that are occurring. And if we don’t have a good idea of how much methane is being emitted and where it’s being emitted, then the ability to dramatically reduce those emissions is greatly limited.

Susan:

So how did this project get started in 2017?

Steven:

About 10 years ago, we began to realize that we did not have good data on methane emissions from the oil and gas supply chain. That made it really difficult to have a reasoned conversation and take appropriate action. We developed a series of studies with literally hundreds of scientists in the United States and Canada to quantify methane emissions and, during that effort, we realized that the emissions pattern was quite different than had previously been understood.

By 2017, we saw it was really important to continue this empirical work on a global scale, because of course the results in North America were not necessarily the same as what would be found in other supply chains. We wanted to really understand the nature of the problem and provide data that allows for efforts to mitigate those emissions.

With the collaboration of the companies in OGCI, as well as with scientists across the globe, we identified places where we thought it was feasible and necessary to get more data, including on offshore systems in North America, since we had only looked onshore. And we built a scientific programme that would allow us to collect that kind of data, build a wider range of datasets and then use that to figure out where we should look next.

Susan:

Working with the oil and gas companies through OGCI, how did you feel comfortable about scientific independence and the integrity of the data?

Steven:

We used a set of approaches that we had developed in North America to ensure that the data was independent, and yet benefited from the insights of those who are working on the ground and understand the systems that we’re studying.

Once the scope of work for a specific study is identified, we get approval from the steering committee of the studies, which includes four members of OGCI, but also the European Commission, EDF and the UN Environment Program. The work is then shifted completely to the lead investigator who is responsible for carrying out the work and publishing the paper.

We have a science advisory committee of leading experts from around the world who review the plans and data that come out of it. And then this work is submitted to scientific peer reviewed journals, where it has to pass review to be published.

Susan:

What have you found most interesting in the studies published so far?

Steven:

What we’ve seen is that the patterns of emissions observed in those areas are not materially different than what we’ve seen in North America. There are a few occurrences that are significantly larger than the rest and have a big impact on the overall characteristics of what you’re observing. These are often referred to as super emitters in the oil and gas industry.

We also saw we were able to take a lot of the methods that were developed in North America and apply them to other parts of the world. This is really about building a global community of scientists with the expertise to be able to measure methane emissions from the oil and gas supply chain with greater rapidity and ease as we move into a heavy focus on mitigation.

In offshore facilities, we discovered that those in shallow water had higher emissions and the deep-water ones were lower. That was not widely expected and it’s saying, again, we need to know more. We see that it’s a complex, complicated system, and the connection between the parts of the system are key. If we just look at individual pieces, you may miss serious issues – we have to think about it as a supply chain.

Susan:

Are we making progress in seeing the big picture on methane emissions?

Steven:

We have enough data in enough places where action is possible now, and many of the mitigation opportunities are clear and cost-effective, so there’s no reason not to be taking action now to reduce those emissions, even if we don’t have the full picture. There are clearly places, where we need to have more information, but we know a lot, and much, much more than we knew just a decade ago.

Susan:

You are passionate about collaboration and stakeholder engagement. Why?

Julien:

Whatever the footprint that you bring to the climate challenge, you will not solve it alone. Climate change is an extremely complex issue. It impacts every segment of the economy and as a global challenge, it requires a global answer. So we need collaboration with every type of stakeholder that we can engage with to accelerate the transformation of the energy sector and bring low carbon solutions at the scale required by the Paris agreement.

Susan:

What are some good examples of OGCI’s recent collaboration?

Julien:

OGCI is about practical action, so when we engage with stakeholders it’s the same focus as when we work with our members to move to a net zero world. For example, on methane emissions we have a long-term partnership that we launched back in 2017 with EDF and the United Nations Environment Programme to run a campaign to measure emissions on different types of oil & gas facilities and test quantification technology. OGCI is a financial sponsor, but more importantly, we open access as well to our sites and facilities and provide some technical knowledge to the debate.

Another partnership is one we launched last year with the World Bank and the Payne Institute. Again, this is a dual financial and technical partnership for us. The Payne Institute has launched a programme to capture satellite information on flaring, translating the image into a quantity of gas that is flared and making the data public. There is a lot of research behind the algorithms, and this needs technical expertise and collaboration.

Maybe one last example that I could share is the Global Methane Alliance where we engage with policymakers and provide knowledge sharing and technical support to countries for them to include methane reduction targets from the oil and gas sector in their national climate strategies.

Susan:

These are complicated deals and climate action is urgent. How long does it take to actually make them happen?

Steven:

It’s a trade-off between the time it takes to implement and the impact you think it can have. That’s always the judgment that we try to make when we create a partnership. We have a number of partnerships with the UN and the World Bank, so these can be expedited relatively quickly.

We have to identify where there is a gap in the science or in the markets, to enable scale up. We look at whether OGCI is the right organization to bring additional value and who could be the right partner. And once you have those three components of the equation, it can move ahead quickly.

We don’t want to do something that is already existing, of course, but we also don’t want to spend months or years on a partnership that would not deliver meaningful impact.