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ENERGY ministers from 24 countries have pledged to support carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects at a delegation in London.

The Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), whose members include the UK, the US, China, Russia, Australia and India, met yesterday to debate a strategy for CCS prior to the negotiations in Copenhagen in December to agree a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Ministers concluded that CCS was both viable and vital to meet CO₂ emissions targets, and that its importance should be recognised in international agreements such as the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change. They also said that cooperation and knowledge sharing should be increased between developed and developing countries and to this end, initiated the Capacity Building Programme to enable all members to deploy CCS by sharing information, tools, skills and expertise.

Delegates at the Forum discussed a CCS roadmap from the International Energy Agency (IEA) which acts as advisor to 28 industrial nations, which claims the developed world must invest up to $3000b/y in the period 2010–2020 if CCS is to expand, with developed countries investing $1.5–2.5b/y. It also says 100 CCS demonstration projects are needed by 2020, within developing countries.

Ed Miliband, the UK’s energy and climate change secretary, co-chaired the Forum with Norwegian energy minister Terje Riis-Johansen. Miliband said at the Forum: "We need countries around the world to finance demonstrations, as we are doing in the UK. We need technology co-operation for know-how and capacity building and a financing agreement at Copenhagen which can drive CCS forwards in developing countries."

In an open letter to CSLF, US energy secretary Steven Chu called for an “aggressive global effort” to make the deployment of CCS technology widespread and affordable within the next 8–10 years.

“Can this aggressive timeline be achieved? Having examined the technology and consulted with leading scientists, researchers and industry experts over the past few months, I am convinced the answer is yes. Without question, there are many hurdles to the broad deployment of this technology, but none appear to be insurmountable,” he wrote.

Chu said that the US would invest $4b, matched with $7b from industry, to advance the technology. This includes $1b to the FutureGen CCS project in Illinois, which will produce electricity and hydrogen whilst capturing almost all its emissions, $2.7b to support both commercial and demonstration scale, new and retrofit, CCS plants, and $500m in CCS monitoring techniques. He said that up to ten CCS projects could be up and running in the US by 2016.

The CSLF’s 24 members represent 75% of world energy consumption, 76% of world CO₂ emissions and 78% of world GDP.