(Oil & Gas 360) – Houston assumes its familiar role as global energy leader for four days this week for The Gastech Climatetech & AI Conference Sept. 17-20.
About 50,000 attendees and 800 companies from 125 countries are expected to hear about progress on the group’s mission to “foster the development of green molecules and electrons within a new energy ecosystem, underpinned by evolving policy frameworks and innovative technologies.”
The conference synergies stem from policymakers, innovators, energy producers, and financial experts working to review progress and create incentives to shorten the path to Net Zero. PricewaterhouseCoopers has reported that global investment in climate technologies reached nearly $640 billion in 2023. The conference comes against the backdrop of an International Energy Administration estimate of almost $10 billion per day required solely in oil and gas to offset or capture the industry’s emissions.
In addition to presentations on hydrogen’s viability and advances in Carbon Capture and Utilization and Storage (CCUS), less familiar technologies to be discussed includes how LNG regasification can be applied to cryo-desalination for water without emissions (separating salt from ice by freezing before it melts back to purer water).
Another high-profile technology at the conference is Direct Air Capture (DAC) to augment CCUS. In the U.S., $3.5 billion is currently slated to build four DAC hubs per year.
AI emerges as a topic of growing importance for the group as discussions will assess the extent to which the benefits of AI, in what it can do to operational efficiency and quicker adaptation of emissions-reducing technologies, mean in the face of its voracious appetite for electricity and the resulting pressure on the grid and potential for generating even more emissions than AI can help identify and reduce.
Policy discussions include Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), whereby individual countries pledge measurable emissions reductions. Another is the Industrial Transition Accelerator, which examines investment opportunities and obstacles in operations, power generation, transportation, and hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, cement, transportation, shipping, and petrochemicals, as well as incentives to create more private/public partnerships.
More on the conference can be found here: gastechevent.com
By Jim Felton for oil&gas360.com
