Thousands of Oil & Gas industry structures in the sea are approaching the end of their lives. At this time, they typically need to be removed and the environment returned to a safe state. This process is known as decommissioning. As many of these sites are old (typically 20+ years) and originally were drilled before the current environmental regulations existed, there has often been some contamination of the seabed around these sites. To ensure that no harmful effects will occur, decommissioning operations need to be supported by an environmental assessment and subsequent monitoring. Monitoring may be required over many years after decommissioning, especially if some structures are left in place. Monitoring surveys in the offshore environment are expensive and time-consuming, requiring ships and many specialist seagoing personnel. This requirement, although vital, will have a considerable cost for industry and the public. Ocean robots, which use computer systems to carry out survey missions by themselves, are regularly used in detailed scientific assessments of the environment. As they collect very high-quality data quickly, such robots have recently been adopted for some tasks by industry but these still require an expensive support ship as they are not capable of long-range missions. Recent technological developments have cut the cost and expanded the range of these robots to thousands of kilometres, making it possible for long-range assessments of multiple sites to be undertaken with a robot launched from the shore. This would have many advantages, improving the quality and quantity of environmental information while cutting the costly requirement for a survey ship and crew. We will carry out the first fully autonomous environmental assessment of multiple decommissioning sites. The Autosub long-range ocean robot submarine ("Boaty McBoatface") will be launched from the shore in Shetland, visit and carry out an environmental assessment at three decommissioning sites in the northern North Sea, before returning around 10 days later with the detailed survey information onboard. The robot will take photographs of the seabed, and these will be automatically stitched together to make a map of the seafloor, structures present, and the animals that live there. Established sensor systems will measure a range of properties of the water, including the presence of oil and gas. As well as the decommissioned sites, the robot will visit a special marine protected area where we know there are natural leaks of gas, to check the robot can reliably detect a leak if it did occur. On return to shore, the project will examine all the data obtained and compare it to that gathered using standard survey ship methods. We will test if the same environmental trends can be identified from both datasets to determine if the automated approach would be a suitable replacement for standard survey ship operations. The project will also produce a fully documented case study, which includes detailed information on the costs and benefits, practical information on deployments and approaches to reduce the risks and improve the efficiency of operations. This will be used by industry, scientists and government regulators, to demonstrate the techniques and will provide the necessary information to potential users to aid in their adoption. The overall goal of the project is to improve the environmental protection of the North Sea at a reduced cost and to demonstrate how this leading UK robotic technology could be used worldwide.

Catalysis is the process of speeding up a chemical reaction by action of a catalyst, a substance that triggers this acceleration without itself being used up. This ability to efficiently convert one substance into another is hugely important to the economy and society; it serves both to add value to simple chemical building blocks by increasing complexity (for example, converting gas and oil fractions into products ranging from fuels and solvents to materials and pharmaceutical products) and to alleviate harmful waste streams (for example, catalytic convertors in car exhausts). It is estimated that catalysts are involved in the manufacture of over 80% of the materials around us and account for over 20% of UK GDP. But this does not mean that catalysis is a mature technology. There are still fundamental unanswered scientific questions and a growing need for new catalyst technologies, especially related to achieving clean growth for industry. The catalysts used today have been honed over decades to work with specific, fossil fuel-derived feedstocks. As we move to a low carbon, more sustainable, net-zero future, we need catalysts that will convert biomass, waste and carbon dioxide into valuable products. The current generation of catalysts cannot achieve this. This project will develop these new catalysts, providing a key technology to achieve net zero carbon ambitions. Achieving this objective requires fundamental scientific advances. It also requires these advanced to be translated into real technologies to deliver their impact and bring value to the business partners. Inspired by nature, breaking down the traditional silos of catalysis research, and embracing emerging areas such as electrification, we will bring together a wide range of catalysis expertise, computation, materials science and advanced analysis to uncover new science and contribute towards achieving net zero - perhaps the most pressing objective for us all.

A thriving aviation sector sits at the heart of the UK's vision for a global and connected Britain. Aviation and aerospace contribute more than £22bn a year to the UK economy. R&D in electric and hybrid aircraft technology is essential in the journey to decarbonise aviation, but will be realised initially in short haul travel. Medium and long-haul aircraft, where the majority of carbon emissions are produced, will remain dependent on liquid fuel for the foreseeable future. The aviation sector demands a fuel of high quality to cope with the extreme conditions experienced in flight around the globe, and thus requires governmental and multilateral organisations to work closely together to ensure safety across the whole sector. This rigour means that the industry has several self-regulating bodies controlling the specification of fuel, principally ASTM International based in the US and the Aviation Fuels Committee, run by the UK MOD and the Energy Institute. The focus on safety has meant that the fuel used by the sector has not changed substantially since the 1960's, despite significant advances in the engine and airframe energy efficiencies. The NewJet Network+ would seek overcome the industry "inertia" by taking a longer term and more strategic view than is currently in place within the specification community. The NewJet Network+ will explore the advantages to commercial aviation offered by the increasing levels of low carbon, synthetic fuel production beyond the existing fuel specification. The network will create a forum (free from commercial restraints that would limit freedom of forward and more strategic thinking) where an exploration of a new jet fuel specification for 2040 and beyond can be investigated. It will specifically focus on the improved properties of synthetic fuels over conventionally refined, fossil fuel feedstocks. Building on the present model of developing synthetic fuels to mimic the behaviour of conventional fuels, the goal of NewJet is to provide new understanding and insights into the benefits and barriers to a new fuel specification by 2040. The outcome of NewJet will be a virtual centre of excellence linking the chemical properties of a fuel to improved performance properties in flight. We believe that intervention at a whole system level will help provide a platform for discussions as to the possible benefits of a new fuel specification for conventional and alternative fuels - in terms of CO2 reductions, but also more widely, the non-CO2 benefits, performance and cost of ownership.

Climate change is a global challenge imposed by excessive emission of anthropogenic greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It is estimated that CO2 is responsible for two-thirds of global challenge. To decelerate this global challenge, several inter-governmental agreements and legislation have been established to reduce the atmospheric CO2 effects (e.g. 2015 Paris agreement, 2019 UK NetZero) through a combination of various technological, societal and industrial actions. One of the key pathways to reduce CO2 atmospheric emission is carbon capture and storage (CCS). In CCS, CO2 is captured from anthropogenic sources and is injected into deep saline aquifers, depleted oil and gas reservoirs or other geological traps. Deep saline aquifers play an important role as their capacity for safe storage of CO2 is two orders of magnitude greater than depleted oil and gas reservoirs. Maintaining injection of CO2 into subsurface is a critical part determining the success of any CCS project, however, this is not always straightforward. Former studies show that with injection of dry super-critical CO2 in saline and hypersaline aquifers, salt forms in porous space and permeability decreases, leading to injectivity loss. Given this challenge it is essential to develop fundamental knowledge and a predictive model to establish know-how of injectivity loss under different thermodynamic conditions (pressure and temperature), hydrodynamic conditions (injection rate), and rock heterogeneity conditions, referred to as THR hereafter. The PINCH project aims to establish fundamental science to develop a novel predictive model and apply it to real field data supported by industries. PINCH brings together scientists from University of Manchester, Durham University, Princeton University, BP, Equinor, Shell to deliver project aims in five work packages (WP). WP1 addresses fundamental questions at pore scale to delineate impacts of THR conditions on salt formation and its aggregation regime under high-pressure high-temperature (HPHT) conditions. HPHT optical visualisation of micromodels and HPHT synchrotron-based X-ray imaging of micro-core flooding will be used to visualise the real-time change of pore morphology under different conditions. WP1 will deliver unique and valuable four-dimensional data sets to establish fundamental knowledge and to support WP3 data requirements. WP2 addresses similar research questions as WP1 in real rock materials at a larger physical scale (core). BGS will facilitate access to the rock materials required. Additionally, pressure injectivity and rock mechanical properties will be measured under different THR conditions. We will address the knowledge gaps in the role of these factors on the injectivity loss. This will assist development of predictive modelling as envisaged in WP3. WP3 is the core of PINCH project as a novel multiscale modelling approach is proposed. Pore-scale modelling will be developed to capture multiphase flow, phase change, salt formation. The model will be validated against the observations in WP1. Also a continuum-scale model will be developed which will incorporate the pore-scale modelling for parameterisation. The model will be validated against the experiments in WP2. WP4 will deliver a high-impact research all fundamental science established in WP1 and WP2 and the engineering tools developed in WP3 will be employed to address real-life laboratorial and field-scale challenge related to the injection of supercritical CO2 in hypersaline aquifers and subsequent injectivity loss. Three candidate CCS fields are Endurance, Quest and Snohvit. BP, Equinor, Shell will provide very strong in-kind contribution to PINCH by providing required data from the aforementioned fields and technical advise. To guarantee the impact of PINCH project, WP5 has been envisaged which covers impact generation, knowledge exchange between academia and industry, and training of junior staff.

Current highly sensitive gravimeters, such as superconducting spheres, atom interferometers, and torsion pendulums, suffer from high manufacture and maintenance cost (up to £400k), bulky size (as large as 2.5m^3) and slow measurement speed (typically 1 hour). Here we propose an exciting innovation in quantifying gravity, based on the frequency measurement of the gravity-induced precession in an optically levitated fast-spinning particle. This novel levitated optomechanical systems (LOMS) gravimeter can be fabricated on a silicon wafer with wafer-level vacuum encapsulation, making its footprint as small as one mm^2. The small size device is mass-producible with a fabrication cost potentially less than £4k. The proposed research uses the analogy of the precession of the Earth, a slow and continuous change in the orientation of the Earth's rotational axis induced by the gravity of the sun, to develop the novel gravimeter. In December 2018, our research for the first time revealed that the precessional motion also appears in sophisticatedly designed LOMS and that optical scattering techniques can precisely measure the frequency of precession [U9]. Our calculation predicts that levitated rotating particles of 10um diameter can achieve the sensitivity of 10^-9 g/sqrt(Hz) and a very fast-spinning particle (GHz reported in 2018 [x19]) can achieve 10^-11 g/sqrt(Hz) sensitivity, respectively. The novel gravimeter can also measure the acceleration due to the Einstein equivalence principle. Thanks to the ultra-high Quality-factor (7.7x10^11 demonstrated in 2017 [x3]) of the rotating particles, the novel sensor will have the potential to cover 11 orders of magnitude of acceleration measurement. Moreover, using the advanced silicon fabrication technique, we will be able to differentiate the centre-of-mass and the centre-of-optical-force of the levitated particle, in order to optimise the range of the gravity (or acceleration) induced torque, and correspondingly design the sensing range and sensitivity of the acceleration, e.g. 10^-6 m/s^2 to 10^5 m/s^2 to cover the seismic and mining health monitoring applications or 1 m/s^2 to 10^11 m/s^2 for fundamental physics research. The sensor only requires short integration times (1ns to 100s, depend on the precession frequency). Thus, it can complete the measurement very rapidly. This novel precession sensing principle can also be utilised to measure force, strain, charge and mass, with similar ultra-wide dynamic range and ultra-high sensitivity potentially. The innovative gravimeter (accelerometer) can be a powerful tool for investigating fundamental physics questions in gravitation, which are pressing and very hard to access experimentally due to the weakness of the gravitational interaction if compared to other interactions. The proposed research can also provide a platform for quantum manipulation of mesoscopic mechanical devices in the nano-scale regime and can serve as a testbed for theoretical predictions. Furthermore, our novel sensor can equipt the oil and gas industry with its applications in CO2-EOR and exploration. It can track temporal and spatial variations of the gravitational field and provide highly accurate information of mass redistribution below the surface. The prototype on-chip LOMS gravimeter has a small footprint so that it can be installed close to the drilling bit. Based on Newton's law of universal gravitation, the gravimeter has the potential to detect 1.5x10^7 kg mass redistribution above the ground, and 1.5x10^5 kg mass redistribution inside the wellbore. The sensitivity of the novel gravimeters installed inside wellbores can be four orders of magnitude better than that of the existing highly sensitive gravimeters. Our research also contributes to CSS, mineral exploration, structural safety monitoring for mining, earthquake warning, inertial navigation and geoscience, and can lead to significant cost savings in multiple industries.