KEY POINTS:
Royal Dutch Shell has agreed to invest in one of the largest carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects in the world.
The oil major's decision yesterday to co-sponsor the final stage of the £80 million ($205 million) Weyburn-Midale CO2 Monitoring and Storage Project in Canada comes on the heels of BP's decision to pull out of a major CCS pilot plant in Australia, after last year cancelling another project in Peterhead, Scotland.
Experts hope that Shell's show of support will give a much-needed boost to the development of a technology that has been deemed vital to meet ambitious emissions reductions targets amid rising energy demands.
In a speech last month, Nobuo Tanaka, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said: "In carbon capture and storage, we would need to build at least 20 demonstration plants by 2020, at a cost of US$1.5 billion [$1.98 billion] each. Such a construction programme should be viewed as a litmus test of our seriousness towards combating climate change."
The increasingly urgent tones about the need for CCS contrast sharply with the sluggish pace of its development. The European Union pledged last year to have 12 large-scale CCS power plants up and running by 2015. Today, there are none and progress has stalled.
The UK started a competition last November to determine the best technology for so-called post-combustion CCS, which pumps emissions created from burnt fuel - coal, oil - deep underground. That is not expected to be complete until late 2009.
Shell and other proponents of CCS argue that the structure of the EU Emission Trading Scheme provide insufficient incentive for companies to build the plants that promise to convert coal-fired polluters into low-emission generators.
"The main challenge is money and the fact that we have never put the various technologies that comprise CCS together in large-scale deployment before," said Ian Temperton, managing director of Climate Change Capital.
China, meanwhile, is building one new coal-fired power plant per week.
The Weyburn-Midale project is exploring how injecting carbon emissions back into oil reservoirs can increase production by pushing previously unrecoverable oil in the field toward wells.
- INDEPENDENT
