The 13th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies (GHGT-13) was held in November 2016 in Lausanne, Switzerland. About one thousand participants from 38 countries and regions attended this conference. It takes place once every two years. The conferences, GHGT-6 in 2002 and GHGT-11 in 2012, were held at Kyoto International Conference Center, which is the birthplace of the Kyoto Protocol. The main theme of the Conference in recent years is how to implement geological CO₂ storage technology.

　Geological CO₂ storage technology originates from CO₂-EOR technology that has been conducted in North America since 1970's to enhance oil mining by means of CO₂ injection. Therefore, various technologies related to the development of oil gas fields are utilized for the investigation and assessment of storage sites and the injection and monitoring of CO₂. At the Sleipner site in the North Sea in Norway, around a million tonnes of CO₂ associated with natural gas production have been annually injected into an aquifer under the seabed since 1996. The world's first CO₂ storage project has successfully injected about 16 million tonnes of CO₂, without any reports of CO₂ leakage or induced seismicity for 20 years, and has been demonstrating a good example of safe geological CO₂ storage.

　Many people might wonder why the implementation of CO₂ storage technology has not moved forward even with the-CO₂-EOR expertise, and experiences of safe storage developed in the Sleipner project. New technology needs to be approved technically, economically and socially to become widely used. To gain technical recognition of CO₂ storage, its safety should be improved first. To improve its safety, it is necessary to minimize the risks due to the uncertainty of geological condition and various technologies. The CO₂ Storage Research Group is developing some tools of safety management technologies for CO₂ injections. Once these tools are completed, they would enable us to comprehensively analyze the monitoring results of injected CO₂ behavior and the observational data of natural earthquakes and microseismicities (ultra-microearthquakes caused by CO₂ injection) around injection sites. In result, the risk management of CO₂ leakage and induced seismicity would be obtained.

　As for the implementation of geological CO₂ storage at scale, up-scaling from pilot-scale injection to large-scale is inevitable. In up-scaling, various relevant technologies should be validated and integrated, which will lead to the improvement of economy (cost reduction), and the acquisition of reliability (social acceptance). The CO₂ Storage Research Group is working with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Illinois, and the University of Texas, by sharing the technologies and experiences on large-scale geological CO₂ storage through the collaborative researches under the US-Japan CCS cooperation. Furthermore, as a member of the Geological Carbon Dioxide Storage Technology Research Association, which was established in April 2016, we are working on the development of the geological CO₂ storage technologies suitable for Japan's reservoirs at a large scale of one million tonnes of CO₂ per year, collaborating other members of institutes and companies: the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, INPEX Corporation, Japan Petroleum Exploration Co., Ltd, Taisei Corporation, and Oyo Corporation.

　We would like to ask for your continued support and cooperation for our activities.