The following is the English version of an article by British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband, and Norwegian Minister of Petroleum and Energy, Terje Riis-Johansen.  The Norwegian version was published in Dagbladet on October 10th.


Taking Decisive Action on Carbon Capture and Storage

With less than two months until Copenhagen there can be no better time to up the pace on carbon capture and storage technology.

The Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum in London will be the centre of where we plan to do just that. It’s a global gathering of 23 countries including some of the biggest emitters that we’re co-hosting with Norway on October 12-14th.

We need a deal at Copenhagen: that’s a given and the CSLF will deal with some of the practicalities of how we’re going to secure the emission cuts we will need.  

CCS is the only technology capable of dealing with fossil fuel emissions and has the potential to cut emissions by about 90%. We can’t and mustn’t close our eyes to the fact that coal is abundant and that developed and developing countries alike will continue to rely on coal fired power generation for decades to come. In short there is no solution to climate change without CCS.

But CCS is still a new and complex technology. We need to bring the knowledge and tools developed by specialists to those that need to implement CCS throughout the world.

The UK and Norway have set out bold ambitions for coal and CCS.  But UK and Norwegian emissions are only part of the problem. We want to be able to share the knowledge from these projects to ensure that CCS becomes an option for the biggest users of fossil fuels globally.

The scale on which this is now envisaged will rival mankind’s great industrial and engineering advances like subsea oil extraction.  It’s not just about building new plants with CCS – it will also be about retrofitting CCS to existing fossil fuel stations, building networks to transport CO2, and exploring where best to store the CO2.

There are exciting developments on CCS happening worldwide with four full-scale plants currently operational globally in Norway, Algeria and US: Norway, USA, Canada and Australia have all also announced their intent to support commercial-scale, full chain CCS projects. But we need to work together to make CCS a reality.

The EU-China Near Zero Emissions Coal (NZEC) project which plans to develop a commercial scale CCS plant in China, as well as the One North Sea Project between Norway, UK, Netherlands and Germany with the aim of establishing a clear vision for the potential role of the North Sea in the future deployment of CCS in Europe, are two examples of the sort of regional and international collaboration that we need and that the CSLF aims to encourage between its members.

The prize for making a breakthrough on CCS will be huge. CCS can help alleviate climate change – the IEA estimates that CCS could contribute up to 20% of the lowest cost global mitigation effort needed to cut emissions by 50% by 2050, in addition to the opportunity to develop a new industry with potentially millions of new jobs.

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