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13 November 2009
Global Partnerships Speed Climate Change Technology Development
Lasting effects of carbon dioxide modify way nations, companies cooperate
This is part two in a series about new international collaborations that are forming to mitigate the most disastrous effects of climate change.
Washington — Rising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) are having an impact on more than just the climate system. The critical need to mitigate this growing problem is beginning to change the way nations share technology-development information, costs and efforts.
Many technological approaches to reducing CO2 emissions from the largest sources — including coal-fired power plants and natural gas processing facilities — exist but require improvement to keep up with the demands posed by climate change. These include energy efficiency, switching from high-carbon (coal) to low-carbon (natural gas) fossil fuels and using more renewable (solar, wind) energy and nuclear power.
Other technologies are in development around the world, including carbon capture and storage — an emerging technology that captures CO2 from industrial processes and stores it deep underground for long periods of time. Much more research and development remains to be done on this and other technologies, and then they must be tested, licensed, regulated, priced and sold in the commercial marketplace. (See “International Collaboration Key to Mitigating Climate Change.”)
This series of actions, expensive and time consuming, traditionally takes place in a single country and the technology is deployed in that country first before moving out into international markets. But climate change is creating the need for a more nimble process.
“Because emissions come from every sector and every country and last so long in the atmosphere, and because of a similar inertia in capital investment” in emissions-mitigation technology, “we have to move the new technologies into the marketplace and around the world at rates that we have never done before,” Richard Bradley, head of the Energy Efficiency and Environment Division at the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, told America.gov.
WORKING TOGETHER
In 2003, it took only four weeks to identify and entirely sequence the genome of the coronavirus responsible for the 2002–2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) pandemic, according to a 2004 IEA report, “International Energy Technology Collaboration and Climate Change Mitigation.” The virus sickened more than 8,000 people and killed 774 in 13 countries.
“This result,” author Cédric Philibert wrote, “came from the cooperation of 13 laboratories in 10 countries that shared their knowledge to the benefit of everyone. The SARS success story offers a striking example of the benefits of increased international cooperation.”
The slower-moving and much more catastrophic threat of climate change is also prompting cooperation among countries, companies and international organizations that are coming together voluntarily in a range of efforts to pool their money, time and expertise against rising temperatures, warming seas and melting glaciers.
New collaborations include the International Partnership for Energy Efficiency Cooperation, launched in May 2009 at the Group of Eight major industrialized countries ministers’ meeting in Rome to provide a forum for policymakers on energy efficiency; and the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute, launched by the Australian government in 2009. More than 20 governments and 80 companies and nongovernmental and research organizations already have signed on to accelerate commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage.
Existing efforts include, for example, the IEA’s international technology collaboration, the 24-member Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF), the seven-country Asia-Pacific Partnership (APP) on Clean Development and Climate and the 17-member International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy.
NEW WAYS TO COOPERATE
The IEA is an intergovernmental organization that provides energy policy advice to 28 member countries. IEA implementing agreements allow member and nonmember governments and organizations to pool resources and foster research, development and deployment of particular technologies. Among its 40 such agreements is a 10-country effort to speed research and development of industrial, energy-related technologies. Signatories are Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Portugal, South Korea, Sweden and the United States.
The CSLF is a ministerial-level international climate change initiative with a membership of 23 developed and developing countries. Its aim is to reduce the costs of technologies used to separate, capture, transport and store CO2 collected from power plants and industrial facilities. CSLF’s 23 projects include a project involving India’s National Thermal Power Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy to study the feasibility of storing CO2 in basalt rock formations.
As part of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, Korea and the United States agreed to work together and with private sector partners on energy security, air pollution reduction and climate change and expand investment and trade in cleaner energy technologies, goods and services.
In one APP project, six partner countries will develop a work program to support the development, demonstration and commercial deployment of oxy-fuel combustion — an enabling technology for CO2 capture and storage from fossil fuel power stations — by 2015.
“We’re creating new ways in which to cooperate,” Bradley said, “and we’re doing that in the main because of the nature of the problem we’re trying to solve on behalf of our citizens.”
More information about the IEA, the Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum, the Asia-Pacific Partnership and the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute is available on the organizations’ Web sites.
