WRAP UP

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/26/12

ON THE INTERNATIONAL FRONT

A South Korean utility is picking up a large stake in the Don Valley carbon capture and storage project in eastern England, Bloomberg reported this week. An unidentified South Korean utility will be the second Korean investor in 2Co Energy’s Don Valley project, the news outlet reported, providing £1 billion ($1.6 billion) in financing as part of the deal. In March, 2Co announced that the Korean company Samsung Construction & Trading would be buying a 15 percent stake in the project and taking on an engineering, procurement and construction role as well. In June Linde AG also obtained a 15 percent share of the project, which, if commissioned, would build a 650 MW integrated gasification combined cycle plant that would capture and pump 5 million tons of CO2 annually into a deep saline aquifer and depleted oil well in the North Sea for enhanced oil recovery. The funding gives extra momentum to the project, which is vying for European Union and U.K. CCS competition funding. The project, though, is one of the costliest in development worldwide. 2Co previously estimated that the onshore portion of the project would cost £3 billion ($4.8 billion), and the offshore infrastructure, including a 250-mile pipeline, would cost another £2 billion ($3.2 billion).

IN CLIMATE SCIENCE

Climatologist Michael Mann sued two prominent conservative groups for defamation this week. Earlier this week Mann, one of the country’s most prominent and controversial climate scientists who directs Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center, announced that he has sued the conservative magazine the National Review, as well as the think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute for “false and defamatory statements” that accused him of academic fraud and compared him to child molester and former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky. In August, Mann announced his intentions to sue the groups. The lawsuit, if it goes to trial, is expected to be one of the most high-profile yet on climate science. Mann shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and others in 2007 for research conducted with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but he is perhaps best known for his so-called ‘hockey-stick graph,’ which showed a sharp increase in global temperatures beginning in the early 1900s. He was also a central figure in the “Climategate” e-mail controversy, where hackers illegally obtained e-mails from climate scientists and alleged them of manipulating data. However, more than half a dozen investigations, including one from the National Science Foundation, declared that the allegations of fraud were untrue.