All right, hello everyone and welcome to this IA webinar we have organized today that's going to be focusing on building a commercial market for carbon capture, utilization and storage. My name is Anathélie Fernández. I'm the head of the technology and innovation units within the energy technology and policy division at the IA and it's my pleasure to pick off this webinar today. I'm sure it's going to be a very informative discussion on how countries can drive non-to-investment in CCUS projects. But let me first of all just give a couple of words in terms of housekeeping aspects. I think we are all very used to these webinar settings by now but please do remember to keep your microphones on mute while you're not speaking and please as well we'd like to invite you to keep your cameras off to avoid any distractions and keep the attention on the panelists that we have with us today. Now just back to the topic of the of the session let me share a couple of words of context and we all know of course how important CCUS is for the global decarbonization efforts and it can reduce emissions in some industrial sectors in which emissions are hard to abate particularly when there are no other scalable technology options that could be applied or those are limited in areas such as for example cement production. But also CCUS can offer lower emissions alternative for hydrogen production which we know as well can help decarbonize other parts of the energy system and that again are difficult to electrify for example. In addition to this CCUS is also the only technology base solution that can enable current removal options. This means removing CO2 from the atmosphere that would be either directly captured from the atmosphere indeed or that could be indirectly doing this removal effects by capturing and storing permanently emissions that will have been emitted from bioenergy sources. And in a way this would be the only tool that would allow us to do to reach this net within the net zero goal that would be so required. But we are not here today to talk about you know how CCUS important how important that is to reach our global net zero emissions we have had long discussions on that. The idea is really to organize this webinar because we've seen that the industry is reaching an interesting crucial point and we wanted to kind of you know get together to discuss you know what would be the priorities moving forward. Over the past three years we've seen that there's been an incredible momentum when it comes to project announcements along the value chain of CCUS. But at the same time and now we just passed January of this year we've seen how we are just six years away from reaching this one billion tons of CO2 capture capacity that would be needed by 2030 to stay on track for reaching net zero emissions by 2050 at the global level. And as positive as this recent momentum is as of today again we are only five percent of the way we have reached only five percent of the way we need to be to reach that goal by 2030. So the scale I needed to reach this gigaton level of deployment represents a major undertaking I think there's no doubt about that and policy support and coordination would be instrumental. So this is why we wanted really to emphasize and have this discussion today. At the end of last year we published a report that takes stock of existing policies that have helped launch CCUS projects to date and identifies the main challenges to future lad scale deployment. The report found that existing policies such as grants tax credits and enabling regulatory frameworks while they are crucial and very important in getting these first projects moving along themselves are insufficient to scale up CCUS across applications at the required pace that would be needed as we've mentioned we are six years just six years away from that one gigaton. At the same time emerging business models are opening the door to new investment opportunities and with that shifting these risks and how they are allocated across the value chain and creating new challenges for policymakers that need to be addressed again if we want to be successful. The creation of commercial market for CCUS requires a suite of policy tools to address all these challenges associated with CCUS deployment and ensuring that investment continues to flow into CCUS projects at the pace that is needed and that projects are completed on time as well and executed adequately. So today we have had the pleasure to have with us three excellent panelists that are going to be unpacking and providing their perspectives into these discussions and these different aspects. We have with us Noah Derrick from the Department of Energy in the United States, also Henriette Nessheim from the Ministry of Energy in Norway and Noriko Seiki from the Ministry of Economy in Japan, Economy Trade Industry in Japan. They will be sharing with us their insights and perspectives on how their respective governments are addressing these challenges and how we can again share the risks along the supply chain of CCUS projects to advance on the pace of progress here. My colleague Carl Greenfield from the IA will be moderating the panel discussion and after which we will open the floor for questions from the audience as well again to have a live discussion where we can get perspectives from all the colleagues joining us. So we'll invite you please to give the Q&A function in Zoom to put your questions so that we can make sure they can be addressed during the panel discussion. But before going into that I just wanted to first introduce my colleague Matilde Haferty who will be giving us more context on these different challenges that governments are facing building on the analysis and the research that colleagues undertook in this project that has been recently launched that I've mentioned. So with that I'll just pass it over to Matilde to proceed with that. Thanks a lot. Thank you RSLE and good morning, afternoon, evening everyone who joined today. Thank you for tuning in to this IA webinar. I'll just give you a quick recap of where do we need to go with CCUS and of these tools that policymakers have a disposal to support CCUS deployment. Just looking back at the past decade or so we see that CCUS deployment has remained relatively flat. This has been partly due to a lack of policies that really drive investment and support the establishment of a commercial market for CCUS. And because of this stagnant growth as an agency we've progressively revised down the role that CCUS plays in our clean energy transitions from around 1.8 billion ton by 2030 in our first net zero roadmap published in 2021 to around 1 billion ton in last year's updates. As you well know 1 billion ton remains a very ambitious target which reflects two things. It reflects that CCUS still plays a key role in decarbonizing selected sectors but also it reflects the positive momentum we've been seeing in the past years. Now as RSLE mentioned this momentum alone won't take us there. To reach this 1 billion ton by 2030 we need momentum to continue but most of all we need projects to reach a final investment decision and commissioning and since time is pressing we need project lead times to be reduced. And at the sectoral level as well we need deployment to also accelerate in sectors that are really key for net zero. Currently over two-thirds of operating capacity is on applications such as natural gas processing but attention needs to be particularly placed in other applications such as industry, carbon dioxide removal, power and hydrogen. So what needs to happen to achieve these goals? We mentioned new business models which include for example large CCUS hubs and networks which represents an opportunity to help shorter need times for new capture projects to connect to infrastructure but also to reduce costs and to allow a wider range of emitters to access CCUS solutions. This is all very positive but challenges do remain on the road to scaling up CCUS, some old and some new created by these new business models. So what can policymakers do to support deployment? The first hurdle that is very commonly faced by CCUS projects is economic viability. CCUS costs can be prohibitively high compared to innovative plants. We calculated that a carbon price between 40 to 60 for high concentration applications and between 70 to 170 per ton of CO2 for diluted applications was required for CCUS to break even with an innovative plant. This is not entirely out of reach. If we take the example of the EU we saw EU ETS prices around $85 per ton in 2022 but this level as you can see is only sufficient to incentivize certain applications and as we have we've seen in the past a year carbon prices have also decreased significantly since then. To level the playing field with innovative technologies governments can first retain cost reduction measures that have helped contribute to operational projects to date particularly for first or second of a kind projects for applications that are particularly important for net zero. But to expand deployment as Aracely mentioned in our introduction more tools are needed and in our report we explore how different levers like driving demand for emissions fuels and materials through public procurement efforts and mandates supporting high and predictable carbon pricing to send an investment signal for future CCUS projects to support revenue generation. This is really what has been missing so far which can be done through carbon contracts for difference or regulated asset base model and finally to support emerging markets and developing economies which is really where the majority of CCUS deployment happens in a net zero scenario. So that can be done through dedicated international funding instruments in addition to other finance instruments such as constitutional finance sustainable debts etc. The second challenge is really to reduce lead times. If we look at operational projects to date we can see that lead times have been or projects have taken anywhere between two to over 10 years from announcements to commissioning with the media in around six years and we have now just six years to reach to 2030. So what drives this lead time? Securing financing can represent a big source of delay for operating projects. We see that reaching FID has taken an average the same amount of time as project construction and securing regulatory approvals. We often hear that permitting is an important issue and indeed it is a time-consuming step for projects albeit being very important particularly for storage development which requires specific exploration and injection permits. So we see hubs as an opportunity to reduce these lead times for capture wishing to connect infrastructure already in place but there's also a risk that these first hubs take longer to develop than initial full-chain projects with issues arising around value chain coordination and social acceptability around large large cost-aid border projects as we are currently seeing in the US. So different tools to reduce lead times. Governments can increase the efficiency of regulatory processes and procedures and establish clear approval timelines and guidance. Data sharing is also an important part of it. Data sharing can help speed up project planning by making data more accessible and transparent which can be done through data sharing requirements on companies or the government itself conducting resource assessment to identify issues to storage sites and finally address social acceptability early on for example through a community engagement requirement in the issuance of public front for projects. The third challenge is to bridge the innovation gap. Many CCUS technologies in capture, transport and storage have been used for decades and as many people working in the CCUS field know but the applications that are matured today are not necessarily the ones that we need for net zero. Most deployment is in industry mostly cement but also by energy with CCS direct air capture both for removal and if your production hydrogen fossil power may need to retrofit young coal plants in emerging economies. This is really where we see cumulative capacity to 2050 and when we look at where these technologies are today in terms of where these applications are today in terms of demonstration we see that around three quarters of this plant capture capacity by 2050 relies on technology that are still a demonstration or prototype scale today. So to address this gap governments can leverage audio and defunding that really focuses on low tiered applications and another important platform is to increase international collaboration and knowledge sharing for emerging economies again to bridge the innovation gap in other markets. And finally and then we can we can move to the panel I wanted to address a fourth challenge which is really these new project complexities that arise from breaking up the CCS value chain. That can include for example the planning of cross border infrastructure that needs to consider regional and sectoral needs and managing access to that infrastructure. If we take the EU as an example most due to storage hubs are being developed in the North Sea but many emitters particularly waste energy, biofuel plants, cement plants, they tend to be smaller and more dispersed inland and governments have a central role to play in coordinating that infrastructure development. So for coordination governments can for example organize tenders for hubs that encourage collaboration across sectors and that's what we've been seeing a lot in different regions to make sure capture and storage development efforts are coordinated. They can also create and this is really important an enabling environment for CCS projects to remove any international barriers to cross border transport and storage of CO2 with bilateral agreements following the London Protocol and also clarify long-term liability and stewardship of CO2 storage sites. So this is really just a snapshot of what countries can do to support CCS there are many other levels and hopefully this is a good segue for our panelists to present today to discuss what tools they are using in establishing commercial CCS markets. Over to you Carl. Thanks Matilde for giving that overview. As Matilde mentioned my name is Carl Greenfield I work on CCS here at the IEA. It was a co-author of the report alongside Matilde and our other colleague Sarah Boudinis and it's clear that reaching the level of CCS deployment needed to stay on track with net zero ambitions is no walk in the park and fortunately as you point out Matilde governments have a suite of policy tools available to them to help us get there and fortunately for us today we have a few of those governments represented here today to give us their perspectives on how their countries are working to build a commercial market for CCS. Today we have with us Noah Deitsch, senior advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy, Henrietta Neshim, assistant director general at the Norway Ministry of Energy and Norihiko Saiki, director of CCS policy at the Japan Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. I'll invite our panelists now I see a few up there but to turn on your video so we can get the discussion started. Just a moment I'll pass it over to our panelists to give a few opening remarks and after which time we'll have a bit of a more detailed discussion and then we'll open it up to the audience for questions. As Arcelli mentioned at the beginning please use the Q&A function in Zoom to submit your questions at any point Matilde and I will be monitoring the Q&A part and group them into a few questions that we'll then post to the panelists later on with about 10 minutes left in the webinar and now over to Noah to give his perspectives on the United States. Noah. Thank you Carl and thank you Carl and Matilde for the invitation and I first want to start with congratulations for the report. I think it's very well done and incredibly important for the broader community to understand what it is going to take to actually realize the ambition that we need for carbon management and its broader role in reaching our Paris Agreement climate targets. So thank you again for all of your work and effort on this. Where I want to share why this report is so important and your analysis is so helpful is in the United States we've had a step change in policy support for carbon management in the past two years with the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law which provide a twin set of subsidies for a wide range of carbon management projects. These subsidies come in the form of the 45 Q tax credit as well as grant funding to the tune of around $12 billion or so over the next five years for commercial scale demonstrations of carbon management projects across the entire value chain and end use cases. And so what we are seeing in the United States today I think is a real indication of what happens in a government funded but industry led policy framework. By that I mean that we have no strong mandate for any industry to actually do carbon management. Instead what we have is an entirely voluntary framework that offers a significant subsidies and so our experience is in that context we're decidedly using one arrow in the quiver that was identified in the report but not creating the type of regulatory mandate that many other countries around the world are pursuing. And what we're finding is that this approach is leading to some interesting early commercialization dynamics. The first of which is that there's an enormous interest in the field compared to where it was two years ago. We have seen the number of permits for geologic storage of CO2 rise over tenfold in the time frame since the passage of these two climate bills in the United States. So interest is clearly there. At the same time we have yet to see any projects reach final investment decision outside of the high concentration sectors that tend to be the most economically profitable. And so we see very little interest in industry financing the hardest to abate and often the most expensive sectors instead really focusing on the the lowest cost opportunities today. And that makes perfect sense given the subsidy is set at a flat level and does not vary depending on what type of capture source or any use we're talking about. I think the the other key dimension here is that we are seeing significant uptake of government incentives for those hard to abate sectors. So once we do specify whether we need projects in the power sector or industry or direct air capture we are seeing significant uptake in interest in those incentives. And so only with this combination of incentives both general for the industry as well as specific to different end-use sectors are we seeing projects actually reach commercial viability. And so I think the thing that we are learning here in the United States is one the power that a subsidy framework can provide but also it's limitations that really subsidies coupled with a mandate that the the need for carbon capture or or any form of carbon management will ultimately be required is what is the most important for actually increasing the urgency and moving the entire industry quickly as opposed to just focusing on the the high costs or sorry the high concentration low cost applications initially. And so we don't have a a recommendation for what we think the optimal policy framework is. We actually think that will vary and depend based on every local political context and where where existing policies and regulations make the most sense. But we think that having that dual framework of both having the incentive as well as a long term mandate or even the expectation of that is something that that's really important. The last piece that I'll conclude on is aside from the the incentive and or mandate framework figuring out how to support the the strong implementation of regulation around permitting both of the capture transport and storage is really important for investor confidence in these projects. Our expectation is that once investors do have confidence in applying carbon management to different end cases that we will see financing flow quite quickly into these projects. But the whole field remains new. And while projects have been getting permits at a slow pace we expect that this having the certainty about how long the permitting process takes and having the experience working through it is something that is really important for the field overall and is not something that we think can be done without practice and trial. And so figuring out how to do that having the the flexibility early on to work with industry and communities to make sure that projects are implemented in a strong and robust way is something that's really important. Because at the end of the day we absolutely need to have carbon management projects across a wide range of use cases. And then almost certainly we'll need to have carbon management projects at scale in many of the hard to abate industrial sectors like cement and in the carbon removal space as well. And so figuring out how to both have a breadth of early demonstrations across these cases and then focusing resources where they're going to matter the most for climate in the long run is something that I think we have no time to wait on and are eager to collaborate with others around the world to figure out how we can go farther and faster together on this important climate topic. So thank you all again for inviting me and back over to you Carl. Thanks Noah for those insights. I think you're completely right faster and farther together is definitely how we start to chip away at these challenges. And an interesting point you made also about the US's approach to building this commercial market. It's very much government funded industry led sort of this voluntary framework. And so now this actually sets up well for our next panelist Henrietta Nashim of Norway. And I'll invite Henrietta to give a few introductory remarks and to hear how Norway has started to create this commercial market. Really because one of the first projects starting out of Norway actually came from a bit of a heavier hand on the regulatory side. So it's interesting to contrast these two countries right next to each other. Henrietta I'll pass it over to you. Thank you very much Carl and thank you for the invitation to join this panel today. And I also read your report with great interest. I think it's absolutely excellent. Well Norway has been quite eager on the CCS for many years. It started early on as an early mover on this. And we also have experience with two real projects that have been in operation for almost 30 years. Sleitner and Snövit related to the petroleum activities. So we know that this is kind of safe. They are all stored offshore in Norway. So we have very good capacity for offshore storage due to our geological formations on the Norwegian continental shelf. So how has it developed over the years? I think it's fair to say that this has been a little bit of a roller coaster. It's been moments of high optimism. This can solve many things. Then nobody believes in the technology. You are kind of accused of greenwashing. And then now I think it's really, we really see a new momentum. And I think it's also because we are, it's also becoming evident that we need a technology for the hard to bait sectors. And that this is very important for the, to achieve our climate targets overall. And I think we are a small country. We really have always cooperated very closely with our neighbors.  So we really have to do this together with the Europe, the EU, or the UK and the countries around. But it's true that our geological potential for storage is quite significant. But then it needs to also be kind of a viable model for this. So I think we have to also see that as an early mover, we choose to try to solve some of these chicken and egg programs that we always hear about the coordination issue. So we therefore went in and supported to a large extent this full chain project, the Longship project, where it's connected to two, one cement factory and also waste insulation projects, but combined with storage. Yeah, I will come back to that more later maybe, but we are also now engaging with countries around us that they can also store there. And we have also issued over the last two years six new exploration permits to see whether we can have developed new areas also for storage. So we think it's very interesting time, we see much more engagement, both from the industry, from those who want to develop storage and so on. So I think that's what I wanted to mention from my side. But thank you again, look forward to the debate later. Thank you. Thanks Henrietta for those comments. Indeed Norway has been an early mover. And I think a lot of countries are looking to Norway to see how it's developing its projects, how it's developing its market. So I appreciate your comments there, especially what you said about CCUS being a roller coaster globally. We've seen this as well, that's high optimism, a bit of a low and a renewed interest. And on that renewed interest part, it's actually interesting because now we can bring in Japan, Norihiko Saiki, who just last year has made some major announcements with regards to CCUS and is really stepping in as one of those countries where we can see a lot of future activity within CCUS. So Norihiko, over to you for some initial comments. Thank you very much for giving me a very important opportunity to share what we were saying, what we're doing and what we're thinking about it. And yeah, so actually, this handle that CCUS processes and the business models are really helpful for us to understand what is happening in the CCUS globally. And I strongly recommend you to any people who would like to conduct a business about CCUS. Yeah, thank you very much for recording our very basic strategy of the CCUS. And last year, we published the CCUS long term roadmap to materialize our efforts, long term efforts. It's more than 25 years. So we just went through the two major CCUS demonstration projects. And we also conducted our R&D activities through our brother institutions, research institutions with the US and Australia and the European countries and UK. And so, yeah, so our biggest update for now is we got the capital determination to officially propose our appeal for the CCUS business to the national diet. So we expect the national diet discussion will happen in the next month or the next month and we go through, after going through the discussion, we will be our second nation to have a comprehensive market mechanism based on the act. And so we also include not only the storage operator, the plus operation plus the pipeline operations as well. Yeah, so yeah, thank you very much for sharing the information and the policy from the way we've learned a lot from the US experience and Norway's experience. So we somehow try to catch up even at this moment. And so I would like to add the two billets and the page 737 in enabling legislation and rules and the regulation of industrial activities in this box. And the other thing I should mention is about the export of the carbon dioxide. And so we are currently trying to obtain the ruling party's permission to make a official capital determination to propose to accept the amendment of the London Portugal Article 6.2. And at Semitana we also prepare the discussion with the countries like Malaysia. And the last October we made the MOC with the Malaysian National OEC company, Petronas, and the Japanese MOC, Jörgmik, try to develop our perspectives about how the export of the carbon dioxide will be made in the context of the CCS. And we also started to discuss the export and for the mechanism to be built in the through the Asia-USSIS network. And we hosted the search meeting last year with the area. The area is the economic research institute for the ASEAN plus East Asia. And in this forum this would be one of the comprehensive approach toward CCS. So we are accelerating our efforts to the technology transfer of the analyzing of the potential for any country. And at Semitana we also seeking to invest to develop the reservoir of the CCS. And at the same time many of the countries have a great interest to access the technology of the carbon capture process as well. So we are trying to develop our comprehensive research approach to those countries. And at the same time we also are currently promoting around the activities about recuperated carbon dioxide ships. At this moment currently we only have the technology at the scale of the 1,000 ton or something. But at this moment we are conducting our research to low pressure and low temperature liquid fuel ships that we developed from 40 to 60 metric tons, which is almost equivalent to the energy carrier. So I think in that case I think the Asian countries like us in the South Korea and Taiwan and Singapore can export the carbon dioxide at the commercial scale level. So that will be one of the most efficient and plus very important measures to materialize it to develop the international market of the carbon dioxide trade. Regarding the cost, I think this cost is still an issue for any country to deploy the CCS system. But when it comes to the onshore CCS project our scale is expected to be around from $85 to the $100 at this moment. So per ton metric ton. So I think that will be almost equivalent to the carbon pricing in the European countries. At this moment in Japan there is no specific carbon pricing at this moment. But we will also discuss the establishment of the legal based carbon trading system as well. So in that case I think the carbon pricing will also be one of the important incentives for the private sector as well. So we are currently promoting the discussion about OPEX support and as you may know we launched the advanced CCS program to select seven projects including two international projects. And currently we are discussing how to ensure the commercial operations of the CCS. So we've learned and we've searched a lot but I think there's no absolute goal or absolute consensus that how to support the financing. But our tentative analysis shows that there's a certain combination of the support mechanism is needed to facilitate the innate within the commercial operation. So number one is the grant. Number two is the credit system. Number three is the tax incentives as well. So I think that there's a combination needed. So we are currently initiating the discussion to how to commercial operation of the CCS. Yeah so actually we recognize that we are a little bit delayed compared to the US and the European experiences. So we would like to know more about it. So please collaborate with us. And of course there's other potential customers about the deeper collaboration about the deploying the more and more CCS capacities. So we also would like to seek the technical transfer opportunity for those countries. Thank you very much. Back over to you Carl. Thank you. Thank you very much Norihiko for those comments. I think you're very much right. A combination of support mechanisms are needed. This is something we outline as well in our report. And it's interesting to see Japan start to develop its policy structure and incentive structure taking a little bit of lessons learned from the United States for instance from Europe from Norway from different countries around the world. So with that actually we'll we'll start a little bit more of a detailed discussion between the panelists. There's something that we've been thinking about here at the IEA for the last year and a half almost two years now and that has to do with lead times. So as Matilda pointed out in her presentation it takes around six years on average for CCS project to get up and running. These long lead times put the world at risk of reaching the level of deployment needed to stay on track with net zero. So I'm curious to hear from the panelists what are what can governments do to reduce some of these project lead times and what extra steps could the private sector be taking to move projects into operation. I think first we'll start with with NOAA mainly because NOAA you you called it out in your opening remarks saying that regulatory support around permitting is really key to enable investor confidence in projects as well. So NOAA we'll start with you and then Henrietta and Noriko feel free to chime in afterwards. Yeah thanks Carl and while these projects have taken a long time to develop in the past we do not believe that that's a fundamental feature of these projects. We think they can be developed in a much shorter timeline in the future if the incentives are aligned to do so and I think here in the US we're trying to do that through coordinating all of the different regulatory pieces. We have a legislation called the FAST-41 legislation that enables developers that have to apply for multiple permits to do so in a coordinated fashion with a commitment to doing so in less than two years for the full range of carbon management projects. So we recognize this is something that is really important and understand that permitting piece is essential. At the same time it's going to take that industry leadership both to support this with a little bit more transparency early on on the data sharing not just with government and other financial or industry stakeholders but making sure that the community is engaged and really bought in from the beginning. We've seen this be one of the key barriers in the United States context but we also see that many communities are very excited about carbon management projects so figuring out where to do these projects and then also how to provide benefits to those industries so that they are directly being supported by the economic opportunity from these projects and making sure that any environmental impacts are mitigated is something that's really important to make sure that these projects can move more swiftly. Thanks Noah for those comments. Henrietta or Norihiko do you have anything to add on this? Yes I think that overall we just have also have to acknowledge that large-scale infrastructure on energy it is time consuming to develop and it has long lead times and if you look at for instance cross-border electricity rates I think the average is 10 years not that fits apart I think of course we should encourage governments to have a speedier process on permitting but at the same time we need to keep in mind that these processes are also there for good reasons and often it takes time with timelines for public consultations and so on and public hearings and it's very important also to have very good processes that take into account environmental concerns because if the necessary steps are not taken early on well it can also impact public perception of CCS if something goes wrong and impact it in a negative way we see for instance at the moment we experience high public resistance against offshore wind now onshore wind for instance and on grids in general so we really would like to avoid something or on the CCS side but it's true that also what has been mentioned here that the regulatory framework and commercial conditions they're oftentimes developed in parallel as the project because this is kind of a new activity so and we also see that by all the national strategies on CCS that are developed this day so I think we as the government we can always alleviate some of the risk of the project whether it's on funding or whether it's on the regulatory aspects I think that also if you look at it from the private sector frame take that point of view these are very some of these projects are very very big so they would also need time the more costly a project is the more solid analysis and works need to be put in place to have to also provide the right permits and to to apply admin have the permit applications but also for their own to be able to take the next steps in the decision making so and also as the project matured new technological aspect might pop up and then they have to be handled this is at least what we have experienced from but I just also want to emphasize that there is a need for a collaboration between industries and also to develop trust and partnerships all along so I think that also I share and notice you that I think that the lead times will be reduced over time as we gain more experience about the projects become more standardized thank you thanks Henrietta and of course I also appreciate your comments to you on the need to maintain sort of the environmental integrity but also the social integrity of projects during the permitting process Noriko yeah thank you very much um yeah so the CCS market is still pretty mature I just want and so there's no existing the pipelines and there's no limited players of the operators and other some other users so unfortunately we have every knowledge all the knowledge about what would happen market activities of the CCS so at this moment we would like to get up we would cover the cap and we do like to increase the communication among the those players so so we are usually have a monthly meeting of the all of those market players and try to understand that they're um they're how how how the risk will arise and how to cover the potential risks so so um yeah I think the this is the the the nature of the order of the maybe the steps of the market is still pretty mature so that'll be the one of us was our hit date at this moment and um of course um there's a certain mechanism based on the um the regulatory schemes will support the business so uh there's a certain mechanism to provide the exclusive right to a certain exploration and operation but uh I don't know of course um um the ground system is also um covers the potential strengths and so um but we are still learning at this moment so so um yeah so we we we we learn a lot of things and uh and not only the head takes from the Japanese company but also uh we also access to the foreign counterparts and I try to understand what happened so and the communication is is is very important at this moment I can completely agree on that and um and actually I think the Tomoko Mai project in Japan is an excellent case and a success of that early on-site communication of of a project so thank you all for those comments um maybe I'll ask one more question to the panelists and then we can open it up to the questions from the audience so um again please feel free to use the Q&A part of the Zoom call um this this question is is geared more towards Henrietta and Norihiko specifically um Noah feel created chime in as well but um it's it's really because we start to see Norway and Japan look beyond their borders for CCUS projects Norihiko you mentioned this in your comments in terms of exporting CO2 um and of course Norway having more storage availability than they have emissions it's a natural business model to import CO2 um so I'm I'm curious to see what kind of challenges that you two are seeing in developing these cross border projects and what words of advice could you give to countries who are considering developing these projects maybe we'll start with Henrietta first thank you Carl um well the coordination issue along the value chain uh that is of course amplified cross border but I think that my best advice would be to remain patient and pragmatic and to continue to build trust and cooperation in a long term perspective both at industry level as well as government level so in Europe the EU EIA legislation facilitates the cross border cooperation as that we have kind of a common regulatory framework and it's already in place and under development and it for instance through the ETS system with the carbon price and also the CCS directive so we have kind of the same regulatory framework but um so this facilitates a lot then you have the IMO that you have to implement in order to be able to transport cross borders so the countries involved need to have implemented the IMO um uh amendment and also mentioned by Noriko but I can see say also that from what I said on the public perception note I think that there may be a challenge going forward as related to questions on why should one country receive the CO2 from other countries for storage and what would the risk be of that in a long term perspective but apart from that I think uh the I think that's the main challenge for support here thank you yeah thank you very much um yeah this is very this is very also a very fundamental question to cover the um so residual emission in Asia and so we are currently we are the repeated importance of the including the transboundary trust CCS in Asia uh I think I would like to talk about the three things three challenges to cover and uh yeah so we respect the European experiences and we also a few envy even envy the systems of the European countries because there's uh actually the European has the CCS directed and so there's a certain consensus about the regulation so and uh these are things they thought so very important each system is also very critical important so um um when it comes to the so um consent uh agreement or arrangement between the nations I think it's rather very simple but when it comes to the European Asian countries there's no consensus about the regulation so and uh there's a certain um so um tradition of the practice is about from the oil and gas activities so so I think there's sometimes um um so the level of the regulation it's it's diversified so so uh we the Japan is a member country of the so London protocol so we need to somehow request the uh native countries to come up with the regulation of the level which is equivalent to the London protocol requirements that is also that is the first headache for us and this the other thing I need to mention is about the regulation you see um so um lack of the experiences that operate not not only for the industry sectors but also we also request um so um the ministers of the regulatory bodies to allow and get the experiences to operate the regulations so so so we are currently seeking it to the building of certain opportunities for the the staffs and members of the regulatory bodies of the um those uh regulation uh of the ccs reservoir operation so and and at the same time there's no certain supporting mechanism for the emitters to provide the carbon dioxide and so um for the most part I think that around the 2030 or 2040 I think there's a limited emitters or emitter countries can only export our carbon dioxide to those the reservoir and then and then and then that is that that's a certain condition to operate the reservoir commercially in those ASEAN countries so um for for the exporting countries like us and the South Korea and the Taiwan as they can support the as the government to support to the emitters the wizard I think the the little little numbers of the the money can support the emitters those um ASEAN countries and the companies and the last one is the investment so for the developing the reservoir so we are um requesting the um the national diet to add the function to invest uh the reservoir development to the our not you know you know see the of the job man so so I think there are a lot of a lot of things but uh without it I think the regional um so carbon neutrality cannot be accomplished in ASEAN countries so we can do everything what we can do thank you thank you very much Noriko for outlining those those three important points um and thanks to the folks in the audience who are submitting their questions um recognizing time um I'll try to wordsmith a few of the questions into one overarching question for our panelists here um we had one question come in about um kind of the hard to bait industry industry sector um and we had another question come in about the really what's a commercial market and kind of looking more at the long term um the long term view of CCUS um and so in a botched effort to try to combine these two together um I'll start with Noah but I'm I'm curious to hear how the US is approaching um some of the um the hard to abate sectors incentivizing uh capture and hard to abate sectors um a really more long term um how do you see the development of this quote unquote commercial market for CCUS um tax credits grants and perpetuity or in a different way over to you yeah so I think answering that second question first this is fundamentally pollution control that carbon management does not create energy so we have to think about this as how do we incentivize that waste management activity which this fundamentally is that's going to require some sort of government intervention whether it's subsidies regulations combination of the two it doesn't really matter in the long run as long as it happens and so there are plenty of commercial waste management or pollution control markets all of them have some form of government intervention and that's really why our strategy in the near term at the Department of Energy and really in the US is focused on optionality we're not entirely sure how fast alternatives or carbon management on the decarbonization front are going to emerge or invest in heavily to make sure that they do emerge as quickly as they can so electrification fuel switching um other types of uh approaches but at the same time we need to have carbon management as a backstop in some of the events that those solutions face headwinds that are are unexpected or are expected and we can't overcome them as quickly as we needed and at the same time there are other solutions where replacements are just decades away from commercial maturity and so we need carbon management in those at scale quickly and so that's really how we're thinking about that both on the breadth of use cases to demonstrate and have that optionality but focusing today in the the areas where there are the fewest replacements today that really matter the most for climate. Thanks Noah and over to Norihiko and then Henry afterwards. Norihiko if you have any comments on sort of the the longer term vision for for CCUS I know that the the plan that Japan has laid out is really focused sort of the near term but looking more long-term and then even how you're you're starting to address some of those um uh some of those harder to hit sectors as well. Oh thank you very much uh I mistook that that I muted so yeah yeah I think the long term um starts on the um so uh the commitment toward the carbon management is very critical and important so uh actually in our uh advanced CCUS program we are we have already selected the the target industry uh as a as a hardware industry so so um oh generally speaking we are um installed the CCS um in the power sector and oil refinery and steel and the cement and uh power spare paper in the paper industry so so um uh we set the goal and at some time we pass it to the communication and we like to somehow obtain the certain commitment from those uh industries so so I think the so Japan's Japan's practice is based on the communication with when uh uh government to the industry so by doing so we somehow try to um uh program our the important their requirement and that they were request into our transition so so um yeah of course um um so our monetary based incentives is very critical and then and a regulatory based incentives are also very important but uh in Japan we are somehow trying to communicate and then to obtain that their confidence about using utilizing the CCS or other other means to accomplish the carbon neutrality and uh yeah so um the communication is very important for us thank you no ego and Henrietta yes uh no I agree that the the co2 management the co2 in this sense is not like any other commodity since it's for kind of storage internal but we like to think of this as a decarbonization service and we believe that this can be that the willingness to pay for this service will is likely to increase as the ETS price is expected to increase for the industry so in that sense um yeah it's it's very good we you have it as a climate mitigation tool but we we also believe that this can be a commercial activity on its own especially for Norway thanks thank you very much for those comments um and a big thank you to our three panelists here as well as to those who um uh participated in the chat function um I'll pass it over to our selling for a few closing remarks thank you very much Karen and to all the panelists indeed so we've just been hearing uh policymakers have other disposal as free of tools to facilitate and promote the deployment of CCUS projects which is very important experience has shown that layering or stacking various policies across the CCUS value chain can help address these different risks that a project may face and so it's important that policies work to set up a viable and sustainable commercial market for CCUS that tracks investment and retains it over the long term as well and ultimately governments will need to assess the level of risk they are willing to take on and so in some cases this may mean taking on a greater level of risk in the early stages ensuring that first mobile projects have their financing and support needed through start operations in other cases this may mean that the government plays a much making role coordinating the deployment of projects across the value chain but in any case governments may choose to shift their risk appetite as the CCUS market develops as well so this is very dynamic environment and will be uh again very important to ensure that we should best practices in this space one point was clear to me uh building a commercial market for CCUS is not an easy task and and so there's no one size fits all approach here uh again that's why it's so important to have this type of gatherings and exchanges and making sure that we can leverage on best practices across different regions creating such a market uh requires addressing multiple economic uh lead time innovation complexity challenges however these challenges are not answer-mountable and overcoming them is entirely possible with the right policy environment and investments uh from the industry so now is not the time to slow down is rather to make sure that with this recent momentum on CCUS uh that we've seen uh this can really show us that there is a strong interest from commentaries and companies in advance in CCUS and so again sharing lesson learns and experiences like we heard from today can help us ensure progress is uh is really shared uh raising international ambition can play a keyboard here and so the recently launched carbon management challenge for example which brings uh together 19 countries including the three representatives here today and the European Commission is a step in the right direction to raising global ambition and so for CCUS to play its role in the carbonization portfolio the next step is to capitalize on this ambition and really deliver so uh with that I'd like to really conclude the the interesting session uh again just big thanks from my side to the excellent panelists today to Noah, Henrietta and Norihiko but also to all of the ones that uh I mean great experts who were joining us as well remotely and thanks very much for uh staying with us and to ask these questions but the final big thanks from my side as well to the great IAT behind the analysis for not just that report but also organizing this uh great discussion so thanks very much everyone let's keep in touch and have a great day


because we are already a little bit late. So next speaker is Mike Brockhurst and the title is exactly the same as before. Plasmid mediated horizontal gene transfer in microbiomes. Great, thank you. Thanks for the invitation. Just to pick up Connie's question, yes we have measured fitness costs on the rhizosphere. Yeah the plasmids are costly, the bacteria do grow and the compensatory mutations do compensate for costs on plant roots. So yeah we can make that up later if you like. So yeah I'm going to talk about our work looking at more complex communities. So as you'll pick up throughout the talk I collaborate a lot with Jamie and some of this this all this work is on the same system as Jamie's and actually I had to throw this talk together quite quickly realizing what Jamie was talking about and that we were in the same session. So excuse me if this is a bit rough and ready but it allows me to talk about some new data that we haven't published yet. Great so this is just an opening slide just to thank everyone involved in the work. I'm recording, do you want to be recorded since you are saying it's new data or do you want to stop? It's fine it's on bioarchive so it's fine. Ellie and Jamie really developed this system when they were in my lab and then a few other PhD students and postdocs have picked up the system and here are some other collaborators particularly Cat Coyt who's done some modeling which I'll talk about today. Okay so I don't need to explain plasmids as being important but you know they really are important in terms of bacterial evolution in terms of carrying genes around and evolutionary innovation as we all know and we all know what plasmids are so they sit separate from the chromosome and they're semi-autonomous and they replicate themselves. So this autonomous nature is really interesting as an evolutionary biologist because it means you can have different fitness interests between the chromosome and the plasmid. We can have these context dependent fitness benefits as we've heard about so in a drug-containing environment an antibiotic resistance gene is beneficial whereas we can think possibly about some constitutive fitness costs of plasmid carriage that need to be outweighed for the plasmid to be beneficial and part of the reason why the conflicts of fitness interests between chromosomes and plasmids can come about is because plasmids are capable both of vertical and horizontal transmission at least when they're mobilizable or conjugative and I'll talk only really about conjugative plasmids today. So that means we can get different levels of selection operating in populations on the plasmid versus the chromosome giving them different evolutionary properties. Also as Jamie touched upon plasmids act as vehicles for other mobile elements and so often how transposed ones nested within them which themselves can have their own fitness interests can hit rides on plasmids and so we can think you have this kind of Russian doll model that people have proposed in terms of understanding the interactions between mobile elements that become nested within plasmids and I'll sort of think about those ideas as we go through. As Jamie mentioned the system we work on at least were isolated from this sugar beet field they isolated loads of plasmids actually and the way they captured them was by them encoding mercury resistance and so just from the original capture of these plasmids we see something really interesting about their evolution so these divergent plasmids all encode basically the same transposon providing mercury resistance and so even in the field we know that that transposon is probably jumping around hitching rides on different plasmids and that was revealed by this exogenous capture experiment back in the 90s by Andrew Lee. So one thing that's interesting about the collection is that most of the plasmids are pretty big and they encode a bunch of other stuff that we don't really know anything about and we focus pretty much exclusively on the mercury resistance trait. So as Jamie explained we can measure the fitness costs of these plasmids and effectively what happens is in the absence of mercury we see these quite large fitness costs but variable among the plasmids and then as you increase the amount of mercury ions in the medium then you can recover a fitness cost for plasmid carriage. So in this region of parameter space we see a benefit of plasmid carriage and we expect them to be on the positive selection at least at least initially whereas here we have a cost and we expect the plasmids to be on the negative selection. So the first thing I'm going to sort of take you through is how the mode of transmission of plasmids varies between those two conditions where you have positive selection for the plasmid encoded trait versus negative selection for the plasmid encoded trait and so we can do that as a very simple experiment with a competition essentially a mixture of strains half of which have the plasmid half of which don't but they have different markers and then we can track transfer of the plasmid over multiple rounds of growth. So the first thing we can see with that experiment which we do across this gradient of mercury selection is that plasmids are able to spread under a broader range of selective conditions than the same genes encoded on the chromosome. So you've shown me on the bottom the data for the chromosome encoded genes and on the top the data for the plasmid encoded genes across three different levels of mercury so yellow is where there is none and then the two blues are where we've got some mercury present and so the chromosomal copy of mercury resistance genes spreads only in the presence of mercury and in the absence of mercury it just stays at 50% whereas the plasmid encoded version can spread where mercury is around and also spread to fixation where mercury isn't around and that's due to the this ability of plasmids to cause infectious transmission and if we look in a bit more detail in those plasmid containing populations so this is just showing you the six replicates here and the three different levels of mercury and showing you in the lines the original donors shaded for plasmid carriage with the solid line and the pink and the original recipients in the dotted line and shaded when they become transconjugates in blue then we can see that in the absence of mercury the plasmid essentially spreads completely through horizontal transmission so the plasmid barriers that we see at the end are basically all transconjugates that gained the plasmid during the experiment whereas when we select with mercury we see global expansion of the original plasmid donor and so you move as you move from this negative to positive selection regime you move from a high horizontal gene transfer regime where you've got lots of infectious transmission and conjugation maintaining the plasmid into a low horizontal gene transfer regime where the plasmid essentially spreads via vertical transmission and so that can be important under more complex selection regimes so this is quite simple we've had just constant selection at different levels but we can look also at pulse selection at different frequencies of imposing mercury selection for those mercury resistance genes and so if you do that in populations where we've introduced a different plasmid than I've just the data I've just shown you so in this case PQBR103 that Jamie mentioned which is a very large plasmid with quite a low conjugation rate and then just showing you some transfer experiments here where we transferred populations for 30 odd transfers the plasmid started at 50 percent in the population and when we imposed continual selection for the plasmid it rose high frequency and then it was sustained when we withdrew selection so the gray is showing you when we added mercury and that's a productive compensatory evolution here when we had slightly less frequent selection for the plasmid we still saw this robust maintenance of the plasmid but when we didn't select for the plasmid to begin with then it felt a very low and sometimes undetectable frequencies but then when we imposed a pulse mercury selection later in the experiment then those very rare individuals that had the plasmid swept high frequency under positive selection but then did subsequently and slowly decline but what's interesting is that the only regime where we really saw appreciable levels of transconduct against in the environment was this regime where we had a very rare selection for the plasmid so showing you again that when you're in a rare positive selection regime then or then essentially conjugation becomes much more important and you enter a more of a high horizontal gene transfer regime um okay so that's just sort of thinking about populations how selection varies the mode of inheritance of a plasmid and also how the frequency of selection for the plasmid alters um relative importance of those modes of inheritance so showing that when you have less positive selection infectious transmission becomes more important but also when you have even rare selection infectious transmission is really important as a mode of maintaining the plasmid in the absence of of any benefit that that plasmid encodes okay so Jamie did some really nice experiments following up that two species system that he talked about just now where we looked at much more diverse kind of natural soil communities these were actually washes that we took from the potting soil that we use in our experiments and so I'm not going to go into much detail here simply to say that we introduced two modes of fluorescence with different plasmids and then we tried to detect those plasmids in the background community after seven days so to do that we used this technique called um epic PCR where essentially you make concatenated PCR products in an in an emulsion so the emulsion ensures that you're only doing that on single cells and you're essentially able to link a taxonomic marker to um the 16s gene sorry you lick the 16s gene to a gene of interest so 16s is your taxonomic marker and you're trying to track the plasmid so by doing that we were able to um detect transmission of two of our plasmids um into members of this community these experiments were really hard to do um and this technique is quite challenging but so this top plot here is showing you the frequency of the proportion of reeds that were due to spw 25 in yellow and then in white showing you the proportion of reeds in the epic PCR that were essentially transconjugate so other species that had gained the plasmid and then showing you some some kind of feel for the diversity of those other species that gained the plasmid and say they're mostly close relatives of the pseudomonas but we do see some surprisingly distantly related species so we're a little bit wary about this data um just because of the difficulties of doing epic PCR but this is really to prove that this these plasmids do disseminate broadly um even in this relatively simple soil community although there's lots of species there but it's a lab a lab system that we've devised um rather than a completely natural system okay so I moved to Manchester recently and at Manchester is this person here he's called um Catcoyt and she has done over the last few years some amazing modeling so she's developed a whole body of ecological theory for understanding the microbiomes complex microbiomes and so most of her work is focused on the human microbiome but I persuaded her to think about our kind of simpler soil microbiome and so what her models typically do um is model lots of different species and then embed a kind of network of interactions among those species and so those interactions might be positive interactions shown by blue arrow over here or negative interactions shown by the the red the red bar there so she can model complex microbiomes that have different levels of negative versus positive interactions in them and then she overlaid onto that model uh essentially a resistance gene and that resistance gene could have different levels of mobility um so it could spread within a species or it could spread between species and so that's effectively modeling a plasmid um in this complex microbiome model so what we've used this model to look at um is how plasmids affect the stability of complex microbiome communities and so we measure stability um essentially is the change in abundance so um it's just a log of this this value here so abundance after exposure to an antimicrobial divided by the abundance before exposure um so we can measure stability in our model um we do that under a bunch of different conditions so we do it in the absence of the resistance gene and in the presence of the resistance gene and we have a we either allow some mild exposure to this antimicrobial stress prior to the perturbation so you could you either have communities that have some mild exposure to the stress or not and then we expose them to this very high level of the stress and we look at their stability we then calculated two metrics so delta r is essentially the change in stability due to a resistance gene being present in the community whereas delta e is the change in stability due to that prior selection week selection with the with the stress um and then we measured three different compartments of the community so we measured stability of the entire community we measured stability just of the background species so these are the species that acts as recipients for the plasmid and don't have the plasmid to begin with and don't have any resistance genes um and then we also measured stability of the focal species so that's just to explain how the model works so what we then do is model the susceptible community and then we model a community where we different communities where we add resistance genes um and then we have a another parameter that controls the mobility of those resistance genes so how likely are they to transmit to other cells and other species in our community um and so i'm just going to show you first off very simple model where we don't have any species interactions going on so this is kind of an ecology free model that's just looking at the properties of the system um when you when you have different levels of mobility okay so if we look first at delta r so this is the the increase in stability due to the resistance gene um then as you increase mobility you see an increase in total community stability and you see an increase in background community stability and basically no effects on the focal species which already has the resistance genes so remember this is this is stability here so we're measuring the ability of them to survive this very strong persuasion so this makes sense as you increase mobility the genes that provide resistance to the persuasion are more able to invade the community and so they provide a broader stability they allow more of the species to survive the persuasion and we can see that effect by looking at the the percentage of resistant cells in the the community um and so yeah as you increase mobility you see more and more resistance in the community um and prior exposure allows the resistance genes on the plasmid to invade lower levels of mobility so they're they're effectively driving driving those those plasmid borne genes into the community at slightly lower levels of mobility um and then finally thinking about this delta e property so this is the benefit this is the the change in stability due to prior exposure and so we see that prior exposure is most important that these intermediate mobility levels so that's effectively capturing this difference here so where prior exposure selects for um genes that become beneficial upon the perturbation later in in the experiment so they're driving these genes through lower levels of mobility driving them into the community at lower levels of mobility so next cap took that model and she put in all of the network of species interactions and so we can test how horizontal gene transfer by plasmids affects um stability of different kinds of microbial communities so she does that by changing the level the percentage of positive interactions in the community so over here we've got a just a competitive community and over here we've got a cooperative community and you can have everything in between um okay so firstly just looking at um the total community so this is the entire community and what we're plotting here are the percentage of positive interactions in that community and then again um ability of the resistance gene um and so this is showing you delta r so the the change in stability due to the resistance gene and you can see that in the total community adding resistance genes is usually good so it increases the stability of the total community and it does so most strongly in the presence of highly mobile resistance genes in a cooperative community um and in terms of delta e we see again that the the effect of prior selection is basically felt most strongly at these intermediate mobility levels so it's more interesting when you look at the background community so here we see um some interesting effects of the network of interactions in the community so as the community becomes more competitive um then we see that introducing resistance genes with low mobility actually destabilizes the background community and so this is because these cells have a really the cells that we've introduced with resistance genes have a really strong advantage when they're surviving because they can survive this perturbation um they don't tend to give those resistance genes away and so they they experience really great competitive release when there's this perturbation and they're able to out compete everything um after the so upon the perturbation but where you have um highly mobile resistance genes and where you have a more cooperative community then you still see these strong benefits in the background community of introducing resistance genes particularly when they're mobile um and then we look when we look at the focal species so this is the where we've the species that originally carries the resistance genes we see this quite interesting effect of prior selection which is where you can see a strong cost in terms of stability for the focal species so this is where in competitive communities there's the cost of giving your resistance genes away to other species so essentially you're no longer benefiting from the competitive release the benefit of being resistance in the absence of non-resistant competitors so finally just to wrap up um I know I've run out of time but we tested this idea in our experimental system so we took a community in soil we introduced our resistance genes either on the chromosome or on two different plasmids and then we transferred them and exposed them to a moat preprospation with or without this weak prior selection so what we see is that essentially adding resistance genes does improve the stability of the total community um but much more interestingly if we look at the background species we can see that introducing chromosomal resistance genes strongly decreases the stability of the background community as predicted by the model um whereas introducing mobile resistance genes actually increases the stability of the background community and so as our model predicted that's because these genes these resistance genes when they're mobile on plasmids move into the background community um and so if we look before and after the pulse then we can see strong selection and increase in those resistance genes in the background and then finally this neat little detail in the focal species that if they give away their resistance genes because they're mobile then we see this weakening of um focal species stability uh when you actually select for those genes before the perspiration okay so just to sum up infectious transmission of plasmids is really important it enables resistance genes to survive and spread without positive selection it increases the stability of microbiomes um against perturbation by antimicrobials but when they encode resistance genes but the precise effects of that depend on the interplay between mobility and the network of interactions in the community thanks for listening thank you very much Michael a okay see if we have questions I don't know if Olivia wants to speak up herself or should I read the question is I find the pattern of rare selection being associated with higher horizontal gene transfer very interesting do you have an explanation or hypothesis for this observation so yes our explanation for that is um in that experiment the the plasmid has a low conjugation rate and in when you don't select for it it declines the very low frequency but it doesn't go extinct and the reason it doesn't go extinct is because that low level of conjugation allows it to persist in the population even though it's costly um and so it's essentially that very low level conjugation and persistence that then allows those very rare cells to reinvade um the community when you select for the genes on the plasmid um and so what's interesting is that that declined to very very low numbers so we couldn't even detect them when we were placing out neat cultures they were so rare um that that decline essentially prevents compensatory evolution happening because the the cells are too rare for them to acquire a compensatory mutation and so at that point conjugation and transmission is really the only game in town for plasmids to survive um in those situations where they're costly and they're not being selected and so um yeah the the answer there is is really that they persist at extremely low levels through conjugation um and just I supposed to follow up Dan Rankin did a model many years ago that sort of predicted that that the very rare pulses of um selection for plasmids could or selection for genes encoded on plasmids could select for their mobility so um that was a nice vindication to his model okay we have one more question by Marco Consentino uh hi I very nice talk um I have a question so does your experimental system would your experimental system allow to address the question of the reduction in diversity in a community when you introduce a beneficial trait uh through a plasmid because this will be the subject of my talk tomorrow but it's very theoretical but okay uh yes it does allow that so um so to explain the the the papers on bioarchive but to explain why it can test that the um when we have prior selection in that system then um some of the slightly unexpected results to do with stability are essentially to do with um the the community being all of the very very susceptible species being selected out of that community and diversity declining um in the presence of resistance genes so yeah that it's a slightly convoluted explanation but yeah it would we could design an experiment to explicitly look at that in a slightly more sophisticated way than than that experiment but um but yeah it would allow that definitely very interesting so you could measure the the amount of taxa as a function of time for example after you introduce a beneficial yeah yeah we didn't track it in enough um at high enough frequency to look at the rate of loss of species and things like that but um but it wouldn't be checked that challenging to do that okay very interesting thanks okay


Welcome back folks to Dow, Dow industry is up 1, Nasdaq down 82, S&Ps off 12, gold, gold caught the bid as it did silver, you get gold trading up $15, 18.22, you get silver up 56 cents, 23.04, and king dollar, king dollar is down 51 ticks, trading 95, 4.33, euros at 114, the ends at 115, the British pounds at 135 to 1 US dollar. Now check it out folks, because if you go over and take a look at the spy, what you're going to see here is this, did give it up in price with the bottom line, you were going lower and you had a wicked contraction of volume, 81 million shares on the downside, you're going into 152, that said we were going higher. We go look at the NBX100, you get the exact same type of setup, gave it up on price, that being said guess what not enough volume, you get 56 million, you're going into 94. Now watch this, this is incredible, and if this stays like this, on the NYSE, yeah there it is, you only did 862 million shares, so the bottom line is that you pull back with dramatically lighter volume, and as we're pulling back, let me see, so we're trading into the day of, let me get this, it's going to be dramatically lighter volume, on the 31st, okay MVOL NE, 31st, okay so look at this, you're doing 862 million shares folks, you're trading into 1.4 billion, bottom line, we're going back, yeah it was an inside day but that doesn't matter, it's always what you're going against, one of the tigers are asking, no, only an inside day, yeah inside days are fine, it doesn't matter, you're still going against it, that's the bottom line. Gold contract caught a bid out here, and it's a good bid, bottom line is that you've got 1440, you need more volume in the gold market, and we've done 138,000 contract, 35,000, that is not great contract volume, silver different ball games, silver not only caught the bid, has the contract volume, we did 53,000 contracts, that little baby there is on its way up to the next swing, and the next swing up there is the 2475, and that's going to be all about Kingdala folks, Kingdala gave it up again, Kingdala very well could be a large ABC structure in the way down, we'll see how it's going to go after the low that was established on Friday which is the 95-137, have a great night folks, have a safe night, come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning, ticks us off, 9 a.m. great show, have a great one, have a safe.


2024 marks 10 years since ISIS's genocide against the AZDs in Sinjar and other communities in Iraq. 10 years on, the wounds of the AZD community in particular remain fresh, as thousands of women, girls and men that ISIS kidnapped remain missing. Hundreds of thousands of AZDs remain displaced, and the families of the victims and the entire AZD community await justice for the heinous crimes of ISIS. Much of Sinjar is still destroyed. The district is challenged by the competing armed forces in groups and the domestic and political rivalry that is taking place there. The complexities of Sinjar cannot be exaggerated. These complexities have obstructed justice and rebuilding the area. They obstruct and they continue to challenge governance, security and peaceful coexistence. Governments, organizations, civil society and other community leaders have tried to help Sinjar and its people to recover from genocide. There has been progress, but it remains modest compared to the wounds of and the needs of the Sinjar and its people. By design, ISIS implicated members of different tribes and communities against each other to sow the seeds of division. As a result, entire tribes and communities were accused of the crimes committed by some. In addition, communities seek justice and reparations for damage caused during the military operations to liberate the areas. Given the expertise of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Iraq and in peace building, the government of Iraq and community leaders over the years sought U.S. peace assistance to prevent communal violence, bridge community community and community government relations, solve problems through dialogue and promote peaceful coexistence. USIP and its partners led dialogues among tribal and other community leaders from Salah Haddeen and southern provinces after the camp Spiker and Massacre of 2014, also among community leaders in Hawija, southwest of Kirkuk in 2015, and in Ninoa Plains and Tala'far after them. Over the years, we were asked if we could facilitate dialogue in Sinjar. We assessed multiple times and concluded that the complexities of Sinjar do not allow for success and may cause harm. We were certain that we cannot cover all of Sinjar's areas, actors and issues. We did not intervene. However, community leaders continued to report to USIP that communal tensions continue to exist. There is lack of trust, a crime against an AZD is blamed on the Arabs, a crime against an Arab is blamed on the AZDs. Community divisions were exploited politically and were causing more harm. These all indicated that despite the fact that AZDs, Arabs and other communities coexisted in peace before, ISIS has clearly caused damage that they needed to be addressed. During the ongoing request to USIP, we selected Northeast Sinjar because it represented the least complex part of a very complicated district. We thought if dialogue cannot succeed there, it would be even more difficult in other places of Sinjar. The preliminary steps indicated that USIP's approach may bear results, but progress remains slow. Along the way, we learned of limitations faced by other organizations who tried other approaches and in other areas of Sinjar. Over the past year, USIP expanded the team to include its long-standing Iraqi partner Al-Tahrir Association for Development, known as TAD, and other members of the network of Iraqi facilitators. The team implemented a five-phase dialogue process involving AZD and Arab community leaders from various parts of northern Sinjar. The initial phases of the process focused on the areas of Borek and Gohbil settlements along with the neighboring villages where AZD, AZD and Arab dialogues were facilitated. Through these dialogues, communities were clear with each other that they seek justice, not reconciliation, better services and peace for their areas, not involvement in politics. They reached common ground and wanted practical solutions. Depending on this success, the dialogue process expanded to include other areas in northern Sinjar, resulting in each community reaching common ground internally and with a broader community as well and establishing channels of communications. The dialogue culminated in the northern Sinjar social cohesion agreement which was signed by AZD and Arab community leaders on March 30th this year in Mosul. Among other things, the community leaders commit to rejecting violence and extremism, support state processes and institutions, and turn to a rule of law to settle differences and conflicts. The leaders also call upon the government actors to unify the administration and security configuration in Sinjar, rebuild their areas and expedite compensation for those who lost relatives in the conflict with ISIS and during military operations. Minor officials from the federal government of Iraq, including the National Security Advisory, the National Security Service and the Ministry of Migration and Displacement, as well as the Pakistan Regional Government, the provincial government and council of Ninoa participated in the ceremony and expressed support to the agreement. The governor of Ninoa participated in the agreement signing ceremony and signed agreement himself. In the country's accounts, I am the president of the National Security Service in this district. The criminals here were in jail, either today or tomorrow or after that. But thank God, the Arabs are now suffering, or they are not suffering, and the Sinjar people are suffering, and we hope that you see them in Sinjar and in the Sinjar people. The Arab country, the country of God, the country of the people, we will not be Ask the truth. There were challenges during the dialogue process and after the announcement. There are those who viewed dialogue and interpreted social cohesion to mean reconciliation, giving up the rights of the victims or giving up on justice or forgiving perpetrators of ISIS crimes or they say the signatories do not represent the people or the document does not include all the needs of Sinjar. The reality is the Northern Sinjar leaders did not offer or request reconciliation. They were very clear that they do not represent the victims or all Sinjar. Ensuring ISIS criminals to justice was always a top demand. Ensuring and expediting reparations for the families of the victims was another priority. Leaders from both communities agreed on the importance of addressing these grievances and that's what makes this process important that both communities were in it together. The process was a community dialogue and finding common ground about community needs. Not a political dialogue or a political agreement. The leaders have shown incredible courage by participating in the dialogue process publicly and transparently sharing what they pursued together again seeking justice together for those who have lost family members by providing a foundation to be built upon. In addition to dialogues, USIP has supported other initiatives like the Conflict and Stabilization Monitoring Framework to convey the voice of the community in Sinjar including the AZDs and other districts of Ninoa to Iraqi government and international community to address the needs of the people. USIP hosted the Nobody's Listening exhibition at its headquarters office in Washington, DC. The exhibition commemorates ISIS's genocide against the AZDs. USIP also hosted public discussions to remind at the 10-year anniversary of ISIS's genocide that the heavy burden of physical and social destruction that ISIS left behind is not done. Sinjar and the ongoing impact of AZD genocide require particular attention.