Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is broadly recognised as having the potential to play a key role in meeting climate change targets, delivering low carbon heat and power, decarbonising industry and, more recently, its ability to facilitate the net removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. However, despite this broad consensus and its technical maturity, CCS has not yet been deployed on a scale commensurate with the ambitions articulated a decade ago. Thus, in this paper we review the current state-of-the-art of CO2 capture, transport, utilisation and storage from a multi-scale perspective, moving from the global to molecular scales. In light of the COP21 commitments to limit warming to less than 2 °C, we extend the remit of this study to include the key negative emissions technologies (NETs) of bioenergy with CCS (BECCS), and direct air capture (DAC). Cognisant of the non-technical barriers to deploying CCS, we reflect on recent experience from the UK's CCS commercialisation programme and consider the commercial and political barriers to the large-scale deployment of CCS. In all areas, we focus on identifying and clearly articulating the key research challenges that could usefully be addressed in the coming decade.

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Carbon capture and storage (CCS): the way forward

Hydrogen technologies have experienced cycles of excessive expectations followed by disillusion. Nonetheless, a growing body of evidence suggests these technologies form an attractive option for the deep decarbonisation of global energy systems, and that recent improvements in their cost and performance point towards economic viability as well. This paper is a comprehensive review of the potential role that hydrogen could play in the provision of electricity, heat, industry, transport and energy storage in a low-carbon energy system, and an assessment of the status of hydrogen in being able to fulfil that potential. The picture that emerges is one of qualified promise: hydrogen is well established in certain niches such as forklift trucks, while mainstream applications are now forthcoming. Hydrogen vehicles are available commercially in several countries, and 225 000 fuel cell home heating systems have been sold. This represents a step change from the situation of only five years ago. This review shows that challenges around cost and performance remain, and considerable improvements are still required for hydrogen to become truly competitive. But such competitiveness in the medium-term future no longer seems an unrealistic prospect, which fully justifies the growing interest and policy support for these technologies around the world.

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlepdf/2019/ee/c8ee01157e

The role of hydrogen and fuel cells in the global energy system

Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system architectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used. 1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications, to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.

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Blockchain technology in the energy sector: A systematic review of challenges and opportunities

Energy security has been an actively studied area in recent years. Various facets have been covered in the literature. Based on a survey of 104 studies from 2001 to June 2014, this paper reports the findings on the following: energy security definitions, changes in the themes of these definitions, energy security indexes, specific focused areas and methodological issues in the construction of these indexes, and energy security in the wider context of national energy policy. It is found that the definition of energy security is contextual and dynamic in nature. The scope of energy security has also expanded, with a growing emphasis on dimensions such as environmental sustainability and energy efficiency. Significant differences among studies are observed in the way in which energy security indexes are framed and constructed. These variations introduce challenges in comparing the findings among studies. Based on these findings, recommendations on studying energy security and the construction of energy security indexes are presented.

Energy security: Definitions, dimensions and indexes

Scopus is among the largest curated abstract and citation databases, with a wide global and regional coverage of scientific journals, conference proceedings, and books, while ensuring only the high...

/pdf/scopus-as-a-curated-high-quality-bibliometric-data-source-12r01s7ze6.pdf

Scopus as a curated, high-quality bibliometric data source for academic research in quantitative science studies

Industrial strategy: building a Britain fit for the future

Business population estimates for the UK and regions

Energy Consumption in the UK

Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics

UK research is high-quality and efficient The UK is a leading research nation in the world in terms of the number of articles that it publishes annually. It is also a leading research nation in the world in terms of the usage and citation of those articles, both of which indicate that its articles are high quality. While the UK has far fewer researchers than larger countries such as the US and China, as a country, it is far more efficient in terms of output per researcher: of the top five research nations (based on article output in 2010: US, China, UK, Japan, Germany), UK researchers generate more articles per researcher, more citations per researcher, and more usage per article authored as measured by global downloads of UK articles. Similarly, while the UK spends far less in absolute terms on research than the US, China, Japan and Germany, recent trends indicate that it is becoming more efficient than all four in terms of output per unit spent. The UK is also becoming even more efficient over time in terms of output per researcher and per unit of research spend. The UK is the clear leader among all eight comparator countries The UK's volume of articles published has grown by 2.9% per year since 2006, which is lower than the world average growth of 4% per year. As a result the UK's share of articles published declined slightly from 6.7% in 2006 to 6.4% in 2010. Conversely, in the same period citations to UK articles increased at 7.2% per year, faster than the world average of 6.3% per year. As a result the UK's share of global citations increased from 10.5% to 10.9%. The UK's share of the world's top 1% of most highly cited papers, which indicates its share of the highest quality published research, was 13.8% in 2010, 2nd only to the US. The UK's field-weighted citation impact, an indicator of quality that adjusts for differing citation practices in different subject fields and therefore of the different subject emphases of comparator countries, is 2nd only to and closing in on the US among the comparator group. Within the UK, its constituent countries reflect the UK's overall positive trend in field-weighted citation, while Scotland shows a modest increase in article share relative to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. UK research is mobile and international The UK researcher population is highly …

Industrial Strategy

Papers

Industrial strategy: building a Britain fit for the future

Business population estimates for the UK and regions

Energy Consumption in the UK

Digest of United Kingdom Energy Statistics

International comparative performance of the UK research base