Carbon Capture and Storage Readiness Index: Comparative Review of Global Progress towards Wide-scale Deployment

Abstract

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is critical for meeting international climate change targets and deployment must therefore be both rapid and global. To date, deployment has been limited to only a few countries with several factors slowing progress. These factors can be quantified to track a country's development and to identify enabling opportunities for wide-scale commercial deployment of CCS. This paper outlines the results of the Global CCS Institute's CCS Readiness Index. The CCS Index quantifies these factors through a set of criteria across four indicators – inherent interest, policy, legal and regulatory, and storage – which are major barriers or accelerators to the deployment of CCS and compares results for over 30 countries. The methodology behind all three indicators is similar, with each indicator employing its own set of criteria to assess conditions within a country at a particular point in time. Countries are then scored against the criteria with the premise being that the highest scoring jurisdictions have the best opportunity for the deployment of a CCS project. The CCS Index demonstrates that countries with clear, long-term policy commitments to use CCS technologies as an emissions reduction method rank highly. Despite strong development trends in some regions of the world, the majority of countries cluster around the midpoint of the analysis, suggesting some progress towards enabling CCS development, but not yet enough to encourage wide-scale deployment.