Global CCS Institute (CEO: Brad Page) headquartered in Melbourne, Australia was established in June, 2009. In the 2008 G8 Summit which was held at Lake Tōya in July, it was declared that twenty large-scaled CCS verification projects would be commenced over the world by 2020. To implement the concept, Kevin Rudd then-prime minister of Australia advocated a outline of the Global CCS Institute in September of the year, and the Australian Government invested 30 billion Australian Dollars to form the organization for the purpose of promoting CCS. “So far in the world 15 verification projects have been demonstrated to be followed by seven more cases planned in a few years. It tells the statement at the Lake Toya Summit has practically been accomplished.” (According to Hiroshi Nambo, Chife at Global CCS Institute Japan) The institute has overseas offices in Washington D.C. of the U.S.A, Belgium, Brussel and Beijing, China other than Japan (located at Nishi-Shimbashi, Minato-ku, Tokyo).

The main tasks of Global CCS Institute include the trend research about laws, regulations and acceptability of society, issuance of the annual report, publication of the preceding projects and knowledge obtained from researches, appealing of importance of CCS as a low-carbon technology and also various public relation activities to enhance general awareness of CCS in pursuit of acceptance similar to the other anti-greenhouse technologies.

Chief Nambo commented, “CCS is influential as a technology to reduce the absolute emission of carbon dioxide, but it accompanies economical burdens for introduction like electricity cost for recovery and storage, and other issues necessary for research and requirements to find a suitable land having the specific layer structure to store carbon dioxide (researches to prevent leak of stored carbon dioxide or to identify the retention site with the emitting source. We would like the participation of the major electric companies running coal-fired power plants, but think that the current situation makes it difficult for them to join spontaneously due to such burdens. The Japanese CCS technology, however, is at an advanced level in the world, and in fact there is a large-scaled ongoing verification case of Tomakomai CCS Project by METI. In addition, the EOR (Enhanced Oil Recovery) working abroad requires a substantial volume of carbon dioxide, but in terms of CCUS (Carbon dioxide Capture, Utilization & Storage) there are some cases already realized with a certain amount of carbon dioxide and land such as a project in Saga City which utilizes the carbon dioxide recovered from biomass power generation into growing of algae. We would like to introduce Japanese technologies to overseas and overseas success cases with technologies to Japan vise-versa, so that we can cooperate from anything possible.”