Japan has led two major regional summits this month to promote carbon capture technologies, an effort that climate groups say could create a smokescreen for the continued use of fossil fuels.
Last week, Tokyo hosted the Japan CCUS Summit, focused on “carbon capture, utilisation and storage”, a conference that was attended by major domestic and international oil and gas firms, as well as government officials from the UK, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and South Australia.
The day after, energy ministers from Japan, Australia and nine Southeast Asian countries met in Kuala Lumpur under the Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC), an initiative that Japan launched in 2023 to propel decarbonisation but has since been criticised as promoting and prolonging fossil fuel use.
In a joint statement, AZEC ministers confirmed their commitment to the COP28 deal in Dubai, in which countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, while also accelerating carbon capture. The AZEC statement stresses the importance of “various and practical pathways” to achieving carbon neutrality.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) encompasses abatement technologies that capture the CO2 emissions of fossil fuel projects at the production site. While CCS is regarded as a solution to reduce emissions in sectors that are difficult to decarbonise like steel or cement, it has so far proved expensive, and capture rates have been lower than expected.
In the lead-up to the COP30 climate summit in Brazil next month, there are concerns about what Tokyo’s enthusiasm for CCUS means for broader emissions reduction efforts.
“There’s a lot of diplomatic muscle that Japan is deploying behind the promotion of CCS,” said James Bowen, a climate and energy policy analyst at Climate Analytics, a research organisation. “Japan has already played a significant role in previous COPs in pushing this idea of abated fossil fuels being a viable alternative to fossil fuel phaseout.”
According to the Japanese government’s 7th Strategic Energy Plan published earlier this year, CCUS can support decarbonisation in sectors where electrification is hard to achieve only with renewables, by abating emissions from fossil fuel sources.
“CCUS is indispensable for simultaneously achieving energy security, economic growth and decarbonisation,” the plan says, adding that Japan will consider support systems to encourage investment and develop suitable sites, among other things.
Climate Home News contacted Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Lifeline for fossil fuels
The latest AZEC declaration adopts language often used by Japan to signal that it and other countries, especially in the Global South, “have to have (their) own pathway to reach net zero”, due to specific “limitations” and “conditions”, said Makiko Arima, a senior finance campaigner at Oil Change International, which recently published a fact sheet on Japanese financing of CCS.
Arima sees Japan’s approach as a smokescreen for continued justification for fossil fuels under the guise of decarbonisation.
Investing in CCS risks diverting resources from clean energy adoption in Southeast Asia, where renewables could make up around 90% of the power supply by mid-century but 99% of solar and wind energy potential remained untapped, according to a 2023 Ember report.
AZEC has led some progress on clean energy in Southeast Asia, with several recent agreements on solar energy, for example. But there is “a concerningly high share of various fossil technology-related agreements and projects”, said Hanna Hakko, senior policy advisor at climate change think-tank E3G.
For example, out of 17 projects in Indonesia focused on new and existing power facilities and industrial energy projects, seven were related to improving the efficiency and carbon footprint of existing fossil fuel power plants, including co-firing of alternative fuels with coal and gas, an E3G assessment of AZEC’s first years, published prior to last week’s ministerial meeting, shows.
Comment: Is “hard-to-abate” really that hard – or is it a justification for delay?
Among the almost 50 memoranda of understanding announced at the meeting this month, six are specifically focused on carbon capture and at least another three refer to it as one of several targeted technologies.
Of the projects announced this year, eight are directly related to fossil fuels, while another two are related to technologies often used to abate fossil fuels such as ammonia and CCS, while not explicitly mentioning fossil fuel-related use.
Later this month, another AZEC summit in Malaysia will bring together the heads of government of its 11 member states.
Costly and controversial technology
Carbon capture projects worldwide have so far failed to meet expectations due to exorbitant costs and technical hurdles. While scenarios aligned with the Paris Agreement goals assume CO2 capture rates of 95% or more in CCUS projects, real-world results have hovered around 50% on average.
Because of this under-performance, according to a report by Climate Analytics, “if Asian countries were to follow a high-CCS pathway, it could lead to additional cumulative GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions of almost 25 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent by 2050″ – or more than double China’s annual emissions.
“People will eventually understand that [CCS is] an expensive and failure-prone technology and diverts attention away from more viable climate and economic strategies,” said Bowen, who worked on the report. “But in the meantime, it will delay climate action.”
While other regional players such as China and South Korea are also investing in carbon capture, Japan is leading the way. The world’s fifth-largest emitter aims to launch the technology commercially by the end of this decade and capture 120 million-240 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of CO2 by mid-century. At the moment, all the world’s CCS plants combined can hold about 51 mtpa.
“One of the big drivers for pushing CCS is that it benefits high-emitting sectors, like coal-fired power plants, that the (Japanese) government doesn’t want to phase out,” said Ayumi Fukakusa, executive director of Friends of the Earth Japan, which contributed to Oil Change International’s research.
According to Fukakusa, the prevailing narrative is that Japan is not competitive in clean energy sectors, therefore its industries want to continue leveraging their perceived advantage in fossil fuel-based technologies.
While they don’t necessarily believe carbon capture will generate significant economic advantages – hence the reliance on Japanese government subsidies – “they can buy time by promoting CCS,” Fukakusa believes.
Business-as-usual energy policy
Over the past 11 years, Tokyo has spent $5.2 billion in public funds on domestic and overseas carbon capture – including blue hydrogen, where hydrogen is produced from natural gas and CO2 is captured in the process, according to Oil Change International. Its report frames Japan’s CCS policy as perpetuating fossil fuel-based industries while diverting finance from proven climate solutions such as renewable energy.
The country has also explored ways to ship captured CO2 to underground or undersea storage sites thousands of kilometres away in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Australia.
Carbon colonialism? Malaysia and Indonesia plan storage hubs for Asian emissions
At last week’s AZEC ministerial meeting, a memorandum of understanding was announced between the Japanese economy ministry and the Malaysian government that foresees bilateral discussions through a joint committee to co-operate on carbon capture, including cross-border CCS.
“It’s very hard to imagine wide-scale uptake of CCS [in Southeast Asia] in the near future, whether supported by AZEC or not,” E3G’s Hakko added. “All these CCS-related initiatives and events are really part of Japan’s longer-term approach to energy policy.”
Consistent with the Japanese government’s approach of pushing “various realistic pathways”, according to Arima of Oil Change International, CCS is “giving a spin to not actually changing much, but making it seem that they’re addressing” the need to reduce climate-heating emissions.
