Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) — Rising costs for carbon dioxide capture and storage are delaying new projects that use the technology and jeopardizing plans to meet emission-reduction targets, the International Energy Agency said.
Costs for carbon capture and storage, or CCS, have increased “significantly” in the past five years, the Paris-based agency said today in its report. CCS must account for almost a fifth of the world’s emission-reduction effort to meet a planned 50 percent cut in all greenhouse gases by 2050, it said.
“We must step up our activities or lose this opportunity,” IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka told reporters at a press conference in Paris today. “The technology must be proven within the next decade.”
This year, Group of Eight industrialized countries have supported an IEA proposal to begin developing 20 large-scale demonstration CCS projects by 2010 to prove the technology can be commercially viable. Royal Dutch Shell Plc and BP Plc, Europe’s largest oil companies, have said CCS is the most realistic way to reduce emissions and have called for regulatory measures to make projects feasible.
“Current spending and activity levels are nowhere near enough to achieve these deployment goals,” according to the IEA’s report. “In the absence of suitable financial mechanisms to support” the technology, “high costs have precluded the initiation of large-scale CCS projects.”
Energy Generation
CCS gathers carbon dioxide during power generation and pipes it into underground storage instead of venting it into the air.
About 69 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide output and 60 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions are related to energy generation, the agency said. Emissions are set to more than double by 2050 if nations neglect carbon-reduction measures, leading to an increase of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius in global temperatures, according to an e-mailed summary of the report.
“CCS offers a viable and competitive route to mitigate CO2 emissions,” the IEA said.
To stabilize carbon emissions, 5.1 gigatons of the gas needs to be captured every year by 2050 at cost of $50 a ton, according to the report. To cut global carbon emissions in half by 2050, 10.4 gigatons must be captured annually at a cost of $200 a ton, it said.
By Eduard Gismatullin
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