Carbon Working Group Pursues Optimal Low-Carbon Scope Selection

The IPA Carbon Working Group (CWG) held its second bi-annual meeting for 2022 on July 19. It was attended by 33 of the member companies, with diverse representation from several industrial sectors, including hydrocarbon production, refining and petrochemicals, chemicals manufacturing, and mining and mineral processing.

The objectives of this meeting were to:

• Provide updates of two ongoing IPA multi-client efforts critical to the decarbonization of attending companies
  • Establishing performance norms of CCS projects
  • Understanding organizational models for a successful transition
• Dive into the “how to” of GHG reduction

Formed in 2020, the focus of the CWG in its first 2 years was on establishing industry-standard emissions breakdown structures and developing capabilities to evaluate the competitiveness and predictability of emissions reduction as an emerging performance indicator for capital projects. CWG has been largely successful in achieving this goal: use of metrics and frameworks began in mid-2021 for E&P projects and will soon be rolled out for other industrial sectors. IPA is now helping project teams improve their competitiveness by benchmarking GHG emissions for individual projects and project portfolios. Using the Carbon Readiness Framework, developed along with CWG members, decision makers can identify gaps in their project practices and adopt Best Practices to improve performance.

The next major objective is to help decision makers use this insight into carbon competitiveness and effectively balance it with other measures of performance, particularly cost. The discussions in the July meeting laid the foundation for identifying key metrics to aid in this optimization exercise, and highlighted some of the drivers and practices that are important for such KPI balancing.

Based on inputs received from the participating companies, IPA is now shaping these topics further and will soon kick off topic-specific technical sections to progress solution development with interested CWG members.

Please fill in the form below for more information about the CWG’s efforts or ways to participate in the ongoing work.