Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
6/26/2015
The United States and China this week announced two new joint carbon capture and storage projects to be embarked upon in keeping with commitments made in November 2014 in the counties’ Joint Announcement on Climate Change. The counties announced the projects, an Ordos Basin CCUS-Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) project and a Guangdong Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) offshore storage project, during a meeting of the Climate Change Working Group at this week’s U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue. “We will be moving forward with really an unparalleled scientific activity to understand new issues in detail of very, very large-scale carbon sequestration in saline aquifers,” Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said at a briefing this week. “We will also be collaborating on a rather unusual project in terms of using carbon dioxide for enhanced water recovery and then treatment of that water, so this going to be kind of interesting.”
Work to meet the goals set out in the November announcement has been ongoing on several fronts, including information exchange among governments, companies and institutes towards the identification of the site of a large commercial-scale CCUS project in China with a view to announcing the selection of the site by the time of President Xi’s next visit to the United States, according to a State Department release. “We exchanged plans on fulfilling our pre- and post-2020 climate commitments, and we announced significant progress on a host of climate change and clean energy initiatives,” Secretary of State John Kerry said at the dialogue. Kerry noted specifically “the selection of a new carbon capture demonstration project that will bring in the private sector in order to cut carbon emissions for both of our countries from one of the biggest emissions sources, which is coal plants.”
The United States and China’s November climate announcement included plans to launch a new joint CCUS project. The project will use captured CO2 for enhanced water recovery. The United States and China will make equal funding commitments to the project, with additional funding to come from other countries and private industry. Under the agreement, the United States committed to reducing net greenhouse gas emissions 26-28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025 and China committed to setting targets to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 and to increase non-fossil fuel energy production to 20 percent of their energy mix by 2030. To do this, the announcement says, work to advance clean coal innovations, among other steps, will be ramped up.
