ACTiON partners meet to share first year’s progress
Members of the ACTiON consortium and representatives of its funders met online over two days in March to review the progress made in the first 12 months of the project and to look ahead to its mid-way point.
The three-year project, funded by the ERA-NET ACT fund and industry, aims to establish how an efficient infrastructure connecting CO2 sources with geological storage and non-geological utilisation options can be developed as part of regional decarbonisation efforts.
Attendees at the meeting heard comprehensive updates on four of the project’s five research-focussed work packages, with work on the fifth – centred on the development of strategic decarbonisation scenarios for six industrial regions – not scheduled to begin until later this year.
IFPEN, Imperial College London, TNO, the University of Alberta and GeoEcoMar detailed the significant progress made in WP1, which focuses on the development of proxy models that capture static geological reservoir characteristics and dynamic reservoir responses for various CO2 injection scenarios such as saline aquifers or depleted reservoirs.
These computationally efficient models are expected to be completed within the coming months and will be implemented as modular building blocks within the models developed in the project’s other work packages.
Elsewhere, TNO and Imperial outlined the progress being made in WP2 on the development and adaptation of proxy models to support the design and management of CO2 transport networks, detailing work on pipeline network simulation and source-sink matching.
Work is also advancing on WP3, centred on storage and risk dynamics, and on WP4, which aims to develop proxy models for CO2 utilisation and conversion technologies as well as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Cost (LCC) models covering the value chain for transport, utilisation and storage options.
These models, which complement existing ICLCA inventory models developed at Imperial, will be used for decarbonisation accounting and reporting in WP5. Researchers at IFPEN, meanwhile, are developing a consequential LCA (C-LCA) methodology that will be tailored for implementation in environmental consequences assessment.