Brendan Boyle Published:Nov 25, 2007

The head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer , wants world oil producers to co-finance 3-billion research into pumping the carbon waste (CO2) from burnt oil back into the underground chambers it came from.

De Boer threw his weight behind a tentative plan at the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries summit that took place on November 17-18 in Riyadh to set up a fund to make carbon capture and storage (CCS) a reality.

He told Business Times on the sidelines of the summit that CCS would be on the agenda at the global environment summit starting in Bali, Indonesia, on December 3, where the UN will be pushing for agreement on an agenda for negotiations leading to an accord by 2009 on an environment plan to replace the Kyoto protocol.

By the end of the Opec summit , four of the 13 members had already stumped up 750-million towards their share of the plan to research ways to mitigate the effect of oil on global warning.

Opec ministers are worried that pollution concerns will dent the world’s appetite for oil and drive consumers towards alternative energy sources.

High prices combined with an increasing international focus on global warming are fuelling commitment to research into alternatives to oil, ranging from nuclear power to harnessing energy from the sun and wind.

De Boer said capturing the carbon gas that flows from refineries and power stations and pumping it back into the reservoirs that oil originally came from was feasible with existing knowledge.

A by-product of the controversial process could be that pumping (CO2) into depleted oil reservoirs under high pressure could make the last residue of oil accessible and so increase viable reserves by up to 200 billion barrels.

But he said some environmentalists were worried that an accident or earthquake could one day release the gas in a catastrophic carbon shock to the atmosphere, and this aspect would have to be researched further.

CCS is a concept being pursued in research in the UK and Australia, but it is not yet known whether it would ever work.

Gas would have to be captured from stacks at high-output facilities like power stations, stored, transported back to the places the oil originally came from and then pumped back into the ground.

The research plan was mooted by former Opec secretary general Adnan Shihab-Eldin during a symposium on energy challenges on the eve of the summit, which was only the third meeting of Opec heads of state in the 47-year history of the organis ation.

De Boer said oil exporting countries, the developed world and the major developing nations, which are likely to massively increase their carbon emissions over the next decade, could each contribute 1-billion to fund the research .

He said coal accounted for about as much carbon emission as oil and that South Africa, a major coal producer, would have to consider ways to mitigate its own contribution to global warming.