New York (Platts)--16Nov2009/233 am EST/733 GMT

Worldwide efforts to fund and establish carbon capture and storage projects have accelerated, suggesting the US and other G-8 countries are gaining ground on a goal of launching 20 CCS demonstrations by 2010, the US Department of Energy said Friday.

DOE said a database compiled by the National Energy Technology Laboratory shows there are 192 proposed and active CCS projects in 20 countries across five continents.

The 192 projects include 38 for capture, 46 for storage, and 108 for both capture and storage, DOE said.

While most of the projects are still in the planning and development stages, or have just recently been proposed, eight are actively capturing and injecting carbon dioxide, DOE said.

Those projects include two each in the US, Canada and Norway, and one each in Algeria and the Netherlands.

At at 2008 meeting in Japan, the G-8 countries adopted a goal to launch 20 large-scale CCS demonstration projects by 2010, and deploy those technologies by 2020.

CCS technology is considered critical to coal-fired power plants if the US and other countries implement more stringent requirements for greenhouse gas emissions.

--Bill Loveless, bill_loveless@platts.com