International talks closed in London today with substantial agreement on the development and deployment of breakthrough Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology.

UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband, who co-chaired today’s Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) with Norway in London, said:

“Today some of the world’s biggest coal consuming nations have shown business as usual on coal won’t do.

There’s agreement that we need countries around the world to finance demonstrations, as we are doing in the UK, we need technology co-operation for know-how and capacity building and a financing agreement at Copenhagen which can drive CCS forwards in developing countries.”

Finance is the biggest barrier to seeing more full scale integrated CCS projects in operation. The Global CCS Institute reports there are 64 full scale integrated CCS projects under way in the world and 7 are operational.

Ministers today also considered a new IEA CCS roadmap that suggests 100 CCS demonstration projects are needed by 2020 to combat climate change, and half of these should be in developing countries.

The main outcomes of today’s London CSLF meeting are:

• agreement that more than 20 industrial scale CCS demonstrations could be needed by 2020, including in developing countries, with knowledge sharing between projects.
• support for capacity building to enable developing countries to host demonstrations and for rapid CCS deployment once it’s proven.
• the strongest signal yet, from developed and developing countries alike, that CCS must be incentivised as part of a global climate deal in Copenhagen this December.

Attention now turns to the meeting in London on 18-19 October of the Major Economies Forum for talks in the run up to Copenhagen.

China has agreed to host the next CSLF in 2012.

The CSLF is currently comprised of 23 members: 22 countries including China, US, Australia, Canada, South Africa and UK as well as the European Commission. CSLF member countries represent over 3.5 billion people, or approximately 60% of the world’s population

Interest in CCS is growing. Significantly, China has a ministerial delegation at the today’s London CSLF for the first time, Poland was today approved as a new member, and Indonesia attended as observers.

CEOs from industry participated for the first time alongside ministers in an open roundtable discussion, in recognition of the importance of the government-industry partnership needed to take CCS to commercial reality.