UK pushed for clean coal to be included in offset scheme

CCS aims to capture greenhouse gas at the source

British officials have failed in an attempt to have carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology included in the international Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). They pushed strongly for CCS's inclusion at recent climate-change talks in Poznan, but the proposal was rejected.

The CDM allows developed countries to invest in an emissions reduction scheme in the developing world in return for carbon credits that count towards emissions targets.

Bronwen Northmore, director of the cleaner fossil fuels policy group within the Department of Energy and Climate Change, said that the developing world needs a mechanism to finance CCS projects – which take carbon emissions from dirty power stations and store them underground – as they cannot afford to develop the technology themselves.

"We fought to get CCS included in the CDM but unfortunately weren't successful," she said in a speech to the World Future Energy Summit last week. "We need a robust financing mechanism for CCS in developing countries, whether it is the CDM or something else."

The UK has set an ambitious CO2 reduction target amounting to an 80 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050. Successfully exporting CCS technology to developing countries might provide a huge volume of carbon credits that would count towards the target.

The UK government is currently running a competition for a CCS demonstration plant. It will fund the winning project which it hopes will have successfully demonstrated the technology by 2014.

But other countries are ahead in the race – in particular Germany, which already has a working CCS plant at the Schwarze Pumpe power station.

Officials from other countries – including Brazil and Venezuela – overruled efforts to get CCS included in the CDM because they regard the technology as unproven and potentially dangerous, and don't want it to be "trialled" in the developing world.

Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, said that the CDM was inefficient and a replacement mechanism – that included CCS – could be more likely to come from the climate talks in Copenhagen later this year.

"Negotiators in Copenhagen are starting from a blank sheet of paper, so the CDM may not be around after 2012, when investment is needed for the developing world," he said. "We may have a new mechanism."