Where my career has taken me

More graphic madness today. I’m doing a careers presentation at Leicester University next week and in an affort to make it a bit more viewer-friendly, I put together a Google map of everywhere I have visited around the world in a professional capacity. My favourite is the one right at the top – Svalbard. What an amazing place…

Deeper Underground

There’s been a lot on the airwaves today about the announcement of more support to carbon capture and storage. It’s an issue I follow with interest, from my Science and Research days. I was quite surprised to hear one of the opponents today saying that there’s only one demonstration plant at the moment, in Germany, as I remember doing a press release in 2006 about a plant in Denmark, which was supported by European research programmes. We also set up the Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plant Technology Platform, which has to develop a strategic vision for carbon capture and identify the research needed to make the vision reality.  But I think all the time I was working on research, my favourite carbon capture discussion (as well as the momst amazing visit I got to take part in) was when we went to Svalbard. The place was astonishing, not least for a budding geologist – look at the picture below for a textbook depiction of a glacier valley, plus there’s one I’ve added just because it was taken at around midnight!

Anyway, the interesting part is that they are really thinking about using carbon capture there. The original industry that drove the islands was coal-mining, so the repositories are there. Another element that hasn’t made the coverage today is that hydrogen is a by-product of the process of carbon capture. So the idea of the guy we spoke to there was that the process of capturing the carbon would produce enough hydrogen to power the vehicles that are used in Longyearbyen, Ny Alesund and the few other settlements. It obviously wasn’t just pie in the sky because I found details of this workshop about the issue on the net.