Climate change collaboration agreement with Italian research centre

Professor Alessandro Lanza and Professor Ralph Haese shake hands in Carbonia.
Sotacarbo President Professor Alessandro Lanza and Peter Cook Centre Director Professor Ralph Haese shake hands in Carbonia. Image supplied

The Peter Cook Centre for CCS Research at the University of Melbourne and the Italian research company, Sotacarbo, will work together to develop collaborative research projects to tackle global warming.

The Peter Cook Centre and Sotacarbo will focus on two areas critically important to develop, demonstrate and deploy carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies: developing low cost and environmentally benign chemical engineering processes and systems to separate carbon dioxide from a range of industrial flue gases and designing and testing advanced tools to better predict and monitor the migration of CO2 in geological reservoirs.

An agreement was reached between Peter Cook and Sotacarbo at the International Sotacarbo Summer School on Low Carbon Technologies, held in Carbonia recently. It was signed on 10 June.

Peter Cook Centre Director Ralf Haese, who recently returned from Carbonia, said it followed several months of discussion.

Professor Haese said the collaboration would help progress the Centre’s work in developing environmentally and socially acceptable cost-effective carbon capture and storage solutions.

“This collaboration is an outstanding opportunity to use complementary research facilities and exchange data to advance CCS research.”

Sotacarbo President Alessandro Lanza said both parties are aware of the significance of working together to tackle global warming by developing greenhouse gas mitigation technologies through international collaboration.

Professor Lanza said Sotacarbo, a public-owned limited company that specialises in carbon capture, utilisation and storage research, and the Peter Cook Research Centre, complimented each other.

“The Peter Cook Centre is a highly competent Research Centre on CCS and simply the best partner for Sotacarbo on this topic,” Professor Lanza said.

“We met and discussed several times before reaching this agreement. It will serve both parties in a very effective way and we are very confident it will lead to a long-term partnership.”

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