IEA OFFICIAL TO PREVIEW UPDATED CCS TECH ROADMAP

Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
5/10/13

The head of the International Energy Agency’s carbon capture and storage office will preview the research organization’s updated CCS technology roadmap next week, which will express even more of an urgent call to deploy the technology. In a plenary presentation at the Twelfth Annual CCUS Conference next week in Pittsburgh, Juho Lipponen will discuss the CCS deployment blueprint—IEA’s first since 2009—that will propose more medium-term incentive policies but call for heightened RD&D work through the end of the decade in order to rapidly deploy the technology. In an interview this week, Lipponen said that while the blueprint acknowledges that deployment has not occurred as rapidly as initially anticipated, it largely maintains the same targets for 2020 and 2030. “We’re not going to be questioning the deployment goals—they’re very challenging but need to be met—but we do reexamine the mechanisms through which we can meet those goals,” he said.

The blueprint will recommend incentivize policies aimed at breathing new life into a sometimes-stumbling industry, focusing mainly on a 2020 timeframe. Lipponen said the document acknowledges that the previous strategy of relying exclusively on carbon markets and public support for only a project’s capital costs has proven to be largely ineffective in recent years. Instead, it will advocate for governments to provide longer-term operational support for projects via incentives—such as the United Kingdom’s proposed feed-in tariffs with contracts for difference for CCS projects. “We’re putting much more of an emphasis on looking at how to create a business case for CCS. I think that’s the key thread that we bring to the forefront much more in this new roadmap,” Lipponen said. “We are taking learnings from current carbon pricing mechanisms that have not been successful in driving CCS and instead we look toward a wider spectrum of policy mechanisms.” Lipponen said the blueprint will likely be released next month.

IEA Looks to Draw Attention to CCS

The roadmap’s release comes as the Paris-based organization aims to double down on its efforts to make CCS development a priority in 2013. IEA has consistently labeled CCS as an essential technology for a global energy system that relies heavily on fossil fuels for electricity generation but also hopes to limit global temperature increases to less than 2 degrees Celsius. In its widely-cited 450 scenario, which aims to limit greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to 450 parts per million of CO2 over the next century, the Agency says that CCS must account for one-fifth of emissions reduction efforts by mid-century. Under that scenario, IEA estimated that 120 large-scale industrial and power generation projects would have to be deployed worldwide by 2020, increasing to 3,000 projects by 2050. But in recent reports to government leaders, IEA has argued that CCS development is woefully off pace, especially for industrial applications.