International Context
Internationally, CCS is considered to be a crucial technological addition to the portfolio of climate change mitigation mechanisms. This is particularly relevant for economies with substantial - and often increasingly growing - reliance on fossil fuels. Many countries are investing in CCS technology, and a number of countries have announced timetables for amending legislation or introducing new legislation to enable CCS in their jurisdictions.
Current examples:
There is a range of CCS projects underway or in planning for demonstration and research purposes. The most commonly cited examples include:
Sleipner stores about 1 million tonnes of carbon each year (or nearly 3 per cent of the Norwegian CO2 emissions in 1990). CO2 has been injected into the Utsira saline aquifer, 1,000 metres below the sea bed since October 1996. To date, the stored CO2 at Sleipner is behaving as predicted, though the operators of the project acknowledge that long-term monitoring and verification of the site is still required.
1 million tons per year of CO2 will be geologically stored, with around 17 million tons of CO2 planned to be re-injected during the life of the project.
The Cooperative Research Center for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC) is one of the world's leading collaborative research organisations focused on carbon dioxide capture and geological sequestration. CO2CRC has undertaken a significant CCS research project in Otway, Victoria, in which up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2 will be injected over a two year period. The New Zealand Government and various New Zealand industry groups are among the members of CO2CRC.
Further Collaboration:
There are also some significant international partnerships and organisations working to develop CCS technology, as well as legal and regulatory standards and precedent. In particular the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum [Link to CSLF website] (the CSLF) and the IEAGHG [Link to the IEAGHG website] are two international bodies addressing a range of CCS technological and legal issues.
These collaborative efforts have already offered significant advances in the global understanding of CCS, however many more research projects and much more legal work is required to test CCS. Moreover, commercial implementation of CCS is required at a substantial scale before CCS can really be fully tested. The G8 and EU have both called for an increase in commercial deployment of CCS by 2020, in order to position CCS to fulfil its global CO2 reduction potential by 2050.
CCS under the Kyoto Protocol:
The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the Kyoto Protocol is designed to enable transfer of technologies from Annex I countries (‘developed' countries with obligations to reduce GHG emissions) to non-Annex I countries ('developing' countries that are not obligated to reduce their GHG emissions).
The issue of including CCS under the CDM has generated a lot of debate worldwide. There is a clear division of stakeholders and countries between supporting and opposing such an inclusion with both sides having valid arguments. To date, CCS has not yet been approved as a CDM activity.
New Zealand has conditionally supported the inclusion of CCS as a CDM activity in its submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in June 2008.
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