In the future, a great many people in North Jutland will be working in the fields of CO2 capture, storage, and utilization (CCUS). At CO2vision, North Jutland’s business hub, we’re hard at work laying the groundwork to make this happen. It’s absolutely crucial that we accelerate skills development.
By Lene Klitgaard and Paw V. Mortensen, Aalborg University
The need for transformation and skills development in the field of CCUS is accelerating and is currently outpacing the growth of new companies in this sector. Even among many long-established companies in North Jutland, the potential of CCUS is clear, and they are ready to adapt their businesses.
Green Innovation Lab
This means that there is a growing urgency to find workers with the right skills to successfully complete the transition to CCUS. We are helping to address this challenge through CO2vision, and Aalborg University (AAU) is spearheading skills development with its Green Innovation Lab concept.
The Green Innovation Lab consists of four activities:
1. Green Innovation Learning
Together with the Energy Cluster, we organize Green Innovation Learning events aimed at facilitating the free flow of knowledge among researchers, companies, and everyone else who will contribute to CCUS. In November 2022, for example, we hosted an event at AAU’s brand-new innovation center, where we worked together to get an overview of who is working on CCUS in the business community and the current status of research in this field.
Along the way, a discussion arose about how we can develop—and perhaps reallocate—the workforce needed to address CCUS challenges. We’ll be highlighting this topic on April 24 at the next Green Innovation Learning event.
2. Serious Play
Companies that participate in the Green Innovation Learning events and are inspired to take further steps in the area of CCUS can participate in a research-based program designed to help the company develop in an area of its own choosing. The program will be guided by researchers from AAU who work with learning and development processes using Lego.
The CCUS sector involves many unknowns in terms of legislation and other regulations, technological knowledge, and so on; however, despite these many unknowns, business models and technologies must be developed now. In this uncertain landscape, the recognized “Lego Serious Play” method can help foster a shared understanding and accelerate development, as Lego helps visualize processes and conversations.
3. Green Innovation Entrepreneurship
As part of North Jutland’s transition to CCUS, there is a need for entrepreneurial skills. That is why we are offering entrepreneurship courses across four AAU degree programs, focusing on change and innovation in the fields of energy, energy planning, change management, and international business communication.
The participants are our regular students, and the courses are tailored so that they can be integrated into the students’ other coursework. In all courses, entrepreneurial skills are applied to a common case study within the field of CCUS. In this way, students are trained to apply their roles and skills to CCUS and to collaborate on the assignment across disciplines.
4. Green Innovation Workshop
: CCUS professionals must be able to apply their expertise in practice in collaboration with other disciplines. In the Green Innovation Workshop, we create a “cocktail” of real-world scenarios where collaboration is put to the test. The ingredients are: one day, one problem, a few companies, and a large number of students from various programs and institutions.
Participants include students from MARTEC’s Marine Engineering program, UCN’s energy programs, and programs at AAU that are also part of Green Innovation Entrepreneurship. A total of three workshops are planned, and during the workshops, students will be provided with a range of tools and guidelines for entrepreneurial methods to solve the case study in interdisciplinary groups.
The first workshop was held in November 2022 and the second in February 2023. If you ask the students, the workshops make sense:
“The workshop has given me a new perspective on both the quality and scope of my own knowledge. And it has reaffirmed my belief that the energy solutions of the future are best addressed through a mix of skills and approaches. It becomes clear when meeting students from energy programs at UCN and MARTEC that my AAU program has a deeply technical focus on putting new technology into practice. The others’ approach is holistic and case-oriented, which gives them extensive knowledge of existing systems and an eye for optimization opportunities.”
Students at AAU Energy
