Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security (JOGMEC) said on June 13 that it has chosen seven candidate projects which capture CO2 and store it underground to offer support for commercialization to build up Japan's decarbonization push.
The move is part of Japan's efforts to lower emissions to meet its 2050 goal of realizing carbon neutrality to tackle climate change.
Early this year, Japan's industry ministry set a target of annual CO2 storage capacity of 6-12 million tonnes by 2030 under a long-term roadmap for carbon capture and storage (CCS).
To support the commercialization of Japan's first CCS projects, the state-owned JOGMEC picked seven projects which have potential to address business scale and cost reduction through a public bidding.
They include five domestic sites such as the Tomakomai area in Hokkaido and Tokyo metropolitan area and two overseas sites include Malaysia and the Oceania region where CO2 emitted in Japan are transported to be stored.
The JOGMEC expects the projects to start operation by 2030 and store a total of about 13 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
The operators come from various industries, such as electric power generation, oil refining, trading and steel-making.
Even if renewable energy is expanded, CCS will be needed for the CO2 emissions that cannot be fully reduced in production processes like steel-making.
CCS technology removes CO2 emissions from the atmosphere and stores them underground. Some of the captured CO2 can also potentially be used in many kinds of industrial applications.
