Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum

Purpose of Initiative

The Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum (CSLF) is a Ministerial-level international climate change initiative that is focused on development of improved cost-effective technologies for the separation and capture of carbon dioxide (CO2) for its transport and long-term safe storage. The mission of the CSLF is to facilitate the development and deployment of such technologies via collaborative efforts that address key technical, economic, and environmental obstacles. The CSLF will also promote awareness and champion legal, regulatory, financial, and institutional environments conducive to such technologies.

Official Partners

Governments:

Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Russia, South Africa, United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the European Commission. All are Charter members except South Africa and Germany, both of which joined prior to the January 2004 CSLF meeting in Rome, Italy, and France, which joined prior to the September 2004 CSLF meeting in Melbourne, Australia.

Civil Society:

Members of the carbon sequestration stakeholder community are involved with the CSLF and are encouraged to participate and interact with the CSLF.

Partnership Goals

The CSLF will seek to:

• Identify key obstacles to achieving improved technological capacity
• Identify potential areas of multilateral collaborations on carbon separation, capture, transport and storage technologies
• Foster collaborative research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) projects reflecting Members’ priorities
• Identify potential issues relating to the treatment of intellectual property
• Establish guidelines for the collaborations and reporting of their results
• Assess regularly the progress of collaborative RD&D projects and make recommendations on the direction of such projects
• Establish and regularly assess an inventory of the potential areas of needed research
• Organize collaboration with all sectors of the international research community, including industry, academia, government and non-government organizations; the CSLF is also intended to complement ongoing international cooperation in this area
• Develop strategies to address issues of public perception
• Conduct such other activities to advance achievement of the CSLF’s purpose as the Members may determine

Progress Toward Goals

the CSLF Charter was signed by

The inaugural CSLF Ministerial meeting was held June 23-25, 2003, in Tysons Corner, VA, USA, where  Ministers from 13 countries plus the European Commission signed the CSLF Charter. The Charter organized the CSLF by creating a Policy Group, which governs the overall framework and policies of the CSLF, a Technical Group, which reviews the progress of collaborative projects and makes recommendations to the Policy Group on any needed actions, and an administrative Secretariat, which organizes CSLF meetings, coordinates communications among CSLF Members, and acts as a clearinghouse of information. A key outcome of the Tysons Corner meeting was the creation of a legal, financial and regulatory issues task force, led by Australia. One of the primary activities of this task force was to describe the considerations that should go into legal and regulatory guidelines for carbon capture and storage.

A CSLF meeting was held in Rome, Italy, January 20-22, 2004, where one of the key outcomes was the presentation of projects for endorsement by the CSLF. These projects were subsequently reviewed and ten of the projects were nominated for endorsement by the CSLF. The endorsement of ten projects was announced at the second Ministerial CSLF meeting in Melbourne, Australia, September 13-15, 2004. Other important accomplishments to come out of the Melbourne meeting include the adoption of the CSLF Technology Roadmap, the establishment of three Technical Group task forces for determining technology gaps in CO2 capture, storage, and monitoring and the need for standardization of storage capacity measurement, and acceptance of the Policy Group task force report characterizing legal and regulatory issues affecting carbon capture and storage. The Melbourne meeting also featured an extended Stakeholders session that resulted in the recognition for increased stakeholder engagement and public outreach. A meeting of the Technical Group was held April 30, 2005, in Oviedo, Spain, where additional projects were proposed for CSLF endorsement and the discussion papers from task forces created at the Melbourne meeting were reviewed. All of the task forces were extended through the next CSLF meeting.

The next meeting of the CSLF will be September 27-30, 2005, in Berlin, Germany, and will include a Technical Workshop in addition to meetings of the Policy and Technical Groups.

Website

http://www.cslforum.org