CCS INSTITUTE HEAD CALLS FOR MORE GOVERNMENT INCENTIVES

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
2/8/13

Decisionmakers should aim to increase government incentives for carbon capture and storage in order to help stimulate the technology’s development worldwide, the head of one of the world’s largest CCS trade groups said this week. In a Feb. 5 speech at a Global CCS Institute forum in Washington, D.C., the group’s CEO Brad Page said proponents need to ensure that CCS is included as an eligible technology in national and state-level clean energy targets and incentive programs, underscoring that CCS often gets excluded in the definition of “clean energy” for some schemes, which ultimately hurts the deployment of the technology, he said. “We’re certainly not complaining that those policies [for other types of clean energy] exist and that many of the important clean energy initiatives are getting support. Our simple message is that we ought to be in a place where … most of the policies are neutral about technologies” and that CCS can subsequently get some of that support, Page said.

In order to further stimulate the development of CCS projects, governments should also aim to adopt climate change and other emissions reduction policies that incentivize low-carbon investments, Page said. He added that policymakers should accelerate efforts to spend money previously earmarked for CCS that have not yet been allocated to specific projects. Page said that to date, governments worldwide have set aside about $21 billion cumulatively for CCS, but that nearly one-third of that amount has yet to be committed to projects. “We’re not always seeing the progression of governments expressing strong support of CCS and then going forward and actually allocating the funds that they’ve had earmarked for quite some time,” he said. “The incentives need to be accelerated in order to get these demonstration projects off the ground.” 

Page Announces Preliminary Restructuring Plans

Also during his speech Page announced many of the changes the Institute plans to make in the coming years as it moves to finalize its new strategic plan next month. The trade group has spent the better part of the last year restructuring itself as initial seed money from the Australian government dries up and the organization seeks to become a financially independent, member-supported organization. GCCSI will soon charge fees to its roughly 360 current members, which run the gamut from government and industry to academia and NGOs. Page said the Institute has not yet negotiated fee levels, but clarified that the group will likely offer different tiers of membership that will charge different rates to help accommodate groups with different budgets.

Page said the Institute will also significantly shift its operating structure, becoming more “regionally focused” as it reshuffles its employees. The group’s Canberra-based headquarters will cut staff in half from 65 to 30 as it moves to Melbourne, where there is better access to a relevant knowledge base, he said, and the organization can further cut overhead costs 50 percent over the next three years. In the meantime, the group will move its center of gravity slightly away from Australia as it doubles its North American staff from four to eight full-timers and hires multiple new specialists on a contract basis that can specifically focus on different ends of the CCS value chain. GCCSI will also redraw some of its regions and make its international offices more self-sufficient from headquarters, according to Page. “I think we’ve heard loud and clear, and I agree entirely with this sentiment, that the Institute actually needs to become a little more relevant in the regions of the world that we operate without losing our global connectedness,” Page said. The group’s $315 million in funding from the Australian government is expected to expire in 2017.

GCCSI was initially funded in 2008 under the government of then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, meant as a way to put Australia on the map as a world leader in CCS. But the Institute has been at the center of national media criticism in Australia as reports there have questioned the group’s organizational effectiveness and spending practices over the last several years. The Institute, though, has long defended its investments as worthwhile toward moving the ball forward on CCS on an international basis. “In a relatively short period of time the Institute has developed extensive expertise in many areas of CCS,” the group said in a June statement on its website following a round of particularly sharp criticism from the Australian media.