Effective strategies for managing the dangers of global climate change are proving very difficult to design and implement. They require governments to undertake a portfolio of efforts that are politically challenging because they require large expenditures today for uncertain benefits that accrue far into the future. That portfolio includes tasks such as putting a price on carbon, fixing the tendency for firms to under-invest in the public good of new technologies and knowledge that will be needed for achieving cost-effective and deep cuts in emissions; and preparing for a changing climate through investments in adaptation and climate engineering. Many of those efforts require international coordination that has proven especially difficult to mobilize and sustain because international institutions are usually weak and thus unable to force collective action...."

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is among the technologies with greatest potential leverage to combat climate change. According to the PRISM analysis, a technology assessment performed by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), wide deployment of CCS after 2020 in the US power sector alone could reduce emissions by approximately 350 million tonnes of CO₂ per year (Mt CO₂/yr) by 2030, a conclusion echoed by the McKinsey U.S. Mid-range Greenhouse Gas Abatement Curve 2030. But building CCS into such a formidable climate change mitigation “wedge” will require more than technological feasibility; it will also require the development of policies and business models that can enable wide adoption. Such business models, and the regulatory environments to support them, have as yet been largely undemonstrated. This, among other factors, has caused the gap between the technological potential and the actual pace of CCS development to remain large.

The purpose of the present work is to quantify actual progress in developing carbon storage projects (here defined as any projects that store carbon underground at any stage of their operation or development, for example through injection into oil fields for enhanced recovery or in saline aquifers or other geological formations). In this way, the real development ramp may be compared in scale and timing against the perceived need for and potential of the technology. Some very useful lists of carbon storage projects already exist – see, for example, the IPCC CCS database, the JP Morgan CCS project list, the MIT CCS database, and the IEA list. We seek to maintain an up-to-date database of all publicly-announced current and planned projects from which we can project a trajectory of carbon stored underground as a function of time. To do this, we estimate for each project the probability of completion as well as the potential volume of CO₂ that can be stored as of a given year.

Natural gas could possibly become a significant portion of the future fuel mix in China. However, there is still great uncertainty surrounding the size of this potential market and therefore its impact on the global gas trade. In order to identify some of the important factors that might drive natural gas consumption in key demand areas in China, we focus on three regions: Beijing, Guangdong, and Shanghai. Using the economic optimization model MARKAL, we initially assume that the drivers are government mandates of emissions standards, reform of the Chinese financial structure, the price and available supply of natural gas, and the rate of penetration of advanced power generating and end-use. The results from the model show that the level of natural gas consumption is most sensitive to policy scenarios, which strictly limit SO2 emissions from power plants. The model also revealed that the low cost of capital for power plants in China boosts the economic viability of capital-intensive coal-fired plants. This suggests that reform within the financial sector could be a lever for encouraging increased natural gas use.