CARBON CAPTURE AND SEQUESTRATION (CCS)

Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS)



Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS)

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) allows industrialized countries required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol to invest in projects that reduce emissions in developing countries, as partial fulfilment of their obligations. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects -- the proposed storage of carbon dioxide from power generation and other source in underground geological reservoirs -- are currently disallowed as CDM projects (IETA, 2008).

However, in November 2006 the Conference of the Parties (COP/MOP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) signalled their interest in the potential of accrediting CCS projects and requested that submissions from interested parties be made by May 2007.

The international Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) is a voluntary climate initiative of developed and developing nations that account for about 77 percent of all manmade carbon dioxide emissions.

Formed in 2003, CSLF marshals intellectual, technical and financial resources from all parts of the world to support the long-term goal of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - the stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in this century. Members are dedicated to collaboration and information sharing in developing, proving safe, demonstrating and fostering the worldwide deployment of multiple technologies for the capture and long-term geologic storage of carbon dioxide at low costs; and to establishing a companion foundation of legislative, regulatory, administrative, and institutional practices that will ensure safe, verifiable storage for as long as millennia (IETA, 2008).

CSLF members engage in cooperative technology development aimed at enabling the early reduction and steady elimination of the carbon dioxide which constitutes more than 60 percent of such emissions - the product of electric generation and other heavy industrial activity.

In 2005, the Forum and the technologies it seeks to develop were identified ...