Shell Signs Up to Join Australia’s Global Carbon Capture Body

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Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Europe’s biggest oil company, will become a founding member of Australia’s A$100 million ($64 million) carbon capture and storage institute aimed at speeding low-emissions power output.

Shell will “actively participate” in the institute’s programs and services, the company said today in an e-mailed statement, without elaborating. The work should help cut the cost of the “expensive” carbon capture and storage, or CCS, technology in the period through to 2020 when the first projects will be developed, it said.

Australia’s government in September said it will set up the institute, aimed at fast-tracking and helping finance coal-fired generation projects that use carbon capture and storage technology to prolong the use of the fuel while reducing greenhouse pollution. Shell estimates the technology could cut global carbon dioxide emissions by more than a third by 2050.

“A safe and cost-effective way to capture and store CO2 from coal, oil and natural gas is imperative if we are going to meet the challenge of increase energy demand and the need to tackle climate change,” Graham Sweeney, Shell’s executive vice president of future fuels and CO2, said in the statement.

Governments and energy companies need to step up efforts to develop CCS projects to have a chance of meeting emissions reductions targets, Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said yesterday. Without CCS projects, emissions reductions in nations such as China and India are “impossible,” he said in an interview on Australia’s Gold Coast.

By Angela Macdonald-Smith