Carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) is an important technology for greenhouse gas reduction worldwide, and it may be a critical component to enable California to meet its greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals. CCUS is a suite of different types of technologies used to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants or large industrial point sources and use this captured carbon dioxide for various purposes including storage, and injecting in rock formations deep underground. Technologies for measuring and monitoring carbon dioxide in the subsurface or in surface facilities also are part of this suite. Because of the complexity and diversity of CCUS technologies, there are numerous challenges to its deployment. The elements to undertaking a CCUS project include both technical and nontechnical—reducing the risks associated with these elements are essential to assuring CCUS is an effective and economic mitigation technology. The greatest risks are associated with the subsurface; thus, proper site characterization and monitoring are important to project success. This report reviews the findings from projects and activities in California, North America and worldwide and addresses the key questions California policy makers must answer to facilitate CCUS deployment effectively.

While California has been at the forefront in adopting an aggressive climate change mitigation policy, it has taken a more measured and tentative approach toward creating an enabling policy and a regulatory framework for carbon capture, utilization and sequestration (CCUS) technologies to contribute to greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions. In 2005, Governor's Executive Order S-3-05 required that California reduce GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050. In 2006, State Assembly Bill 32 codified the 2020 goal into law. In 2006, the California Legislature required two California agencies, the California Energy Commission and the Department of Conservation, to produce a report recommending how the state could facilitate commercial adoption of geologic sequestration from industrial sources. In 2010, three state agencies, the Energy Commission, Public Utilities Commission, and Air Resources Board, convened the California Carbon Capture and Storage Review Panel to make recommendations on specific policy, institutional, and regulatory changes necessary for California to enable commercial-scale carbon capture and geologic storage projects. Since 2006, several legislative bills have been introduced to establish regulatory authority, liability, and address pore space ownership issues, but none have made it into law. To meet the state's aggressive targets, especially to 2050 goal, will nevertheless require widespread adoption of CCUS technologies, according to studies by the California Council on Science and Technology. California contributes 7.5% of the total GHG emissions in the USA, or 1.8% of global GHG emissions. Over half of this currently is from point sources, but that proportion will increase as the state pursues electrification of the transportation sector. Trajectories of future GHG emissions growth suggest mitigation technologies must be implemented at rates on the order of 10–20 million tonnes of GHGs removed per year. The cap-and-trade system recently adopted in California to address the GHG reduction mandates of Assembly Bill 32 would seem to encourage pursuit CCUS technology projects by industrial emitters, but uncertainties preclude developing viable business cases. Uncertainty includes a lack of data on the costs of capture and storage and the lack of cap-and-trade accounting protocols for CCUS technologies. Although these protocols are scheduled to be developed, they will lag the initialization of cap-and-trade in 2012.

This research roadmap reviews existing and developing technologies for the use of carbon dioxide to provide recommendations to the California Energy Commission on the further development and implementation of such technologies. The roadmap reviews and categorizes the known usage technologies currently in use or under development. Uses of carbon dioxide range from well‐developed applications, such as enhanced oil recovery, to much less mature technologies, such as the use of carbon dioxide to produce fine chemicals, chemical feedstocks, working fluids for energy‐related technologies, and building materials.  This roadmap outlines various attributes of technologies such as technology maturity and readiness, the amount of carbon dioxide that would be consumed or used if fully deployed, technology gaps and barriers to full deployment, and the companies or organizations pursuing development of the technologies. This information is then used to highlight technological advances that are needed to overcome existing barriers to deployment. The report also reviews funding from federal sources and examines the potential for California to leverage synergistic federal funding to promote investment in and deployment of usage technologies within the state. This report also discusses the relevance of carbon dioxide usage technologies to California’s greenhouse gas reduction goals.  

This roadmap reviews existing and developing technologies for the utilization of CO2 in order to provide recommendations to the California Energy Commission on the further development and implementation of such technologies. The roadmap reviews and categorizes the knownutilization technologies currently in use or under development. Uses of CO2 range from well-developed applications, such as enhanced oil recovery, to much less mature technologies such as the use of CO2 to produce fine chemicals, chemical feed stocks, working fluids for energy-related technologies, and building materials. This roadmap outlines attributes of technologies such as technology maturity and readiness, the amount of CO2 that would be consumed or utilized if fully deployed, technology gaps and barriers to full deployment, and the companies or organizations pursuing development of the technologies. This information is then used as a reference to highlight technological advances that are required to overcome these barriers to deployment. It also reviews funding from federal sources and examines the potential for California toleverage synergistic federal funding to facilitateinvestment in and deployment of utilization technologies within the state. This report also discusses the relevance of CO2 utilization technologies to California’s greenhouse gas reduction goals.

We have developed a roadmap of CO2 utilization technologies for the California Energy Commission, a state government energy research, policy and permitting agency. The objective of the roadmap is to identify technologies that can make significant contributions to the state's 2020 and 2050 greenhouse gas (CHG) reduction goals. The state of California, under Assembly Bill 32, is committed to achieving reductions to 1990 GHG inventory levels by 2020 and, under Governor's Executive Order S-3-05, to 80 percent below those levels by 2050. The roadmap will guide future R&D investment and policy development for enabling carbon utilization technologies in California. For the purposes of the roadmap, we defined utilization as including technologies that produce a useful product from anthropogenic CO2, or through the processes of capture or sequestration of CO2. Technologies may contribute to reductions directly by permanently sequestering CO2, or indirectly by displacing the use of fossil fuels or more potent GHGs, such as CFCs. Technologies considered include: CO2 as a working fluid (including enhanced oil recovery (EOR), enhanced gas recovery (EGR), and enhanced geothermal systems (EGS)), chemical feedstocks, biofuels, building materials, compressed gas energy storage, cushion gas for natural gas storage, and water and marketable minerals produced from displaced sequestration reservoir fluids. Evaluation criteria include technological maturity, potential market size, purity of CO2 required, commercialization time frame, environmental impacts, water use, data on energy-carbon life cycle analysis, and potential local economic benefits such as job creation. In addition, we evaluated the potential impact of non-technical barriers to commercial- scale adoption, such as the need for clear accounting protocols to provide incentives for CO2 producers to adopt these technologies to meet carbon standards. It may be possible to integrate different utilization approaches. For example, CO2 can be reduced to produce methanol or formic acid, which can be converted into fuels. Other processes to functionalize the carbon atom produce saleable chemicals, such as urea. By combining these two approaches, synthesis of even more chemicals directly from CO2 could be achieved. Widespread deployment of CO2 utilization technologies also depends on integration into planning of a future carbon- energy infrastructure. While single projects for some technologies, such as EOR, may create a demand comparable to the CO2 volumes generated by large sources, other technologies may have to be aggregated and/or combined with geologic sequestration to provide the volume of sequestration required. Deployment networks provide opportunities for cost optimization of pipeline infrastructure and for focusing public or private investment to facilitate commercialization. Currently in California, utilization projects are in the research, pilot, or permitting stages, including projects to combine urea production and EOR, produce high carbon-content building materials, and develop chemical and biological CO2 recycling technologies. None of these projects have yet reached the development stage necessary to demonstrate whether the technologies can contribute effectively to reducing California's CHG emissions.

DRAFT Final contract report prepared by CIEE for the California Energy Commission; contribution to WESTCARB Phase II. The West Coast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (WESTCARB) is one of seven partnerships that have been established by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to evaluate carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies best suited for different regions of the country. The West Coast Region comprises Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, and British Columbia. Both terrestrial and geologic sequestration potential has been evaluated in the Region during Phase II of the project. A centralized Geographic Information System (GIS) database of stationary sources and geologic and terrestrial sink data was enhanced, incorporating relevant project data.

Hyperspectral plant signatures can be used as a short-term, as well as long-term (100-year timescale) monitoring technique to verify that CO2 sequestration fields have not been compromised. An influx of CO2 gas into the soil can stress vegetation, which causes changes in the visible to near-infrared reflectance spectral signature of the vegetation. For 29 days, beginning on July 9, 2008, pure carbon dioxide gas was released through a 100-m long horizontal injection well, at a flow rate of 300 kg day−1. Spectral signatures were recorded almost daily from an unmown patch of plants over the injection with a “FieldSpec Pro” spectrometer by Analytical Spectral Devices, Inc. Measurements were taken both inside and outside of the CO2 leak zone to normalize observations for other environmental factors affecting the plants. Four to five days after the injection began, stress was observed in the spectral signatures of plants within 1 m of the well. After approximately 10 days, moderate to high amounts of stress were measured out to 2.5 m from the well. This spatial distribution corresponded to areas of high CO2 flux from the injection. Airborne hyperspectral imagery, acquired by Resonon, Inc. of Bozeman, MT using their hyperspectral camera, also showed the same pattern of plant stress. Spectral signatures of the plants were also compared to the CO2 concentrations in the soil, which indicated that the lower limit of soil CO2 needed to stress vegetation is between 4 and 8% by volume.

BRAF is the most prevalent oncogene and an important therapeutic target in melanoma. In some cancers, BRAF is activated by rearrangements that fuse its kinase domain to 5' partner genes. We examined 848 comparative genomic hybridization profiles of melanocytic tumors and found copy number transitions within BRAF in 10 tumors, of which six could be further characterized by sequencing. In all, the BRAF kinase domain was fused in-frame to six N-terminal partners. No other mutations were identified in melanoma oncogenes. One of the seven melanoma cell lines without known oncogenic mutations harbored a similar BRAF fusion, which constitutively activated the MAP kinase pathway. Sorafenib, but not vemurafenib, could block MAP kinase pathway activation and proliferation of the cell line at clinically relevant concentrations, whereas BRAF(V) (600E) mutant melanoma cell lines were significantly more sensitive to vemurafenib. The patient from whom the cell line was derived showed a durable clinical response to sorafenib.

Immune-checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), although revolutionary in improving long-term survival outcomes, are mostly effective in patients with immune-responsive tumors. Most patients with cancer either do not respond to ICIs at all or experience disease progression after an initial period of response. Treatment resistance to ICIs remains a major challenge and defines the biggest unmet medical need in oncology worldwide. In a collaborative workshop, thought leaders from academic, biopharma, and nonprofit sectors convened to outline a resistance framework to support and guide future immune-resistance research. Here, we explore the initial part of our effort by collating seminal discoveries through the lens of known biological processes. We highlight eight biological processes and refer to them as immune resistance nodes. We examine the seminal discoveries that define each immune resistance node and pose critical questions, which, if answered, would greatly expand our notion of immune resistance. Ultimately, the expansion and application of this work calls for the integration of multiomic high-dimensional analyses from patient-level data to produce a map of resistance phenotypes that can be utilized to guide effective drug development and improved patient outcomes.