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The UAE Special Envoy for Energy and Climate Change and Chief Executive of Masdar, Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber said: “The UAE recognizes the important role carbon capture and storage can play in a fossil fuel-producing country like ours as we transition to a cleaner and more sustainable economy. More generally, it is widely recognized to be a critical technology for building a low-carbon future globally. The inclusion of CCS in the CDM will significantly boost our efforts to build the national CCS network that Masdar and the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) are exploring, and in turn, help promote cleaner fossil fuel technology across the UAE, the region and the world.

“Abu Dhabi remains one of the key proponents of renewable energy and sustainability through the Masdar initiative. We are privileged to host the UNFCCC meeting in Abu Dhabi and to have the opportunity to highlight the advantages of developing, deploying and demonstrating clean energy technologies that can be reaped for the benefit of our country.”

At the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) meeting in Cancun in 2010, countries provisionally approved carbon capture and storage (CCS) — a means of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and storing them so they do not enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming — as an eligible activity under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Final approval is expected to be given at COP17 later this year in Durban, South Africa, pending the resolution of technical questions, specifically, the modalities and procedures for including CCS in the CDM. The Abu Dhabi workshop will serve as the principal opportunity to resolve these issues, and therefore a critical step towards CCS being recognized as a CDM-eligible activity.

The CDM helps countries like the UAE onto a path of more sustainable development by providing credits that can be sold and used to fund project activities, in exchange for reductions in emissions of global warming gases like those achieved through CCS. As a fossil fuel producer, CCS is a vital technology for the UAE to develop and the CDM promises to be a key tool in enabling its implementation.

Co-funded by Norway and the UAE, the workshop will make recommendations on how to complement existing CDM rules to incorporate CCS by addressing site selection, monitoring, project boundaries, trans-boundary projects, risk and safety assessments, environmental socio-impact assessment, permanence and liability.

The UAE’s increased participation in the UNFCCC negotiations and advocacy for the inclusion of CCS into CDM were some of the key factors for the decision of Abu Dhabi hosting this meeting.

Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC, said: “The urgency of the climate challenge means we need to explore all the technologies at our fingertips. CCS can become a key pillar of global climate action in the future. This workshop seeks to address some of the key technical issues related to the inclusion of CCS in the Clean Development Mechanism, the world's premier tool for mobilizing carbon finance for developing countries."

In April this year, the UAE earned the distinction of being the first country in the GCC to obtain credits from the UNFCCC for reducing carbon emissions, when Masdar received Certified Emission Reductions (CERs) for the Taweelah Project, which recovers waste heat from a power plant to improve its efficiency and produces steam for water production. The UNFCCC also recently adopted a first-of-its-kind methodology developed by Masdar Carbon, one of the five integrated units of Masdar, for identifying energy efficiency in buildings developed in Abu Dhabi.

Initiated two decades ago, the UNFCCC sets an overall framework for intergovernmental efforts to tackle the challenges posed by climate change, recognizing that the climate system is a shared resource whose stability can be affected by emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from all nations.