JAKARTA (Reuters) – Indonesian government aims to accelerate development of a carbon capture and storage (CCS) industry to help fight climate change and is confident the next administration will continue the push, a senior official said on Wednesday.
Indonesia is keen to use hundreds of gigatonnes of storage capacity in saline aquifers and depleted oil and gas reservoirs to store carbon dioxide, tapping demand from countries in eastern Asia looking to curb carbon emissions.
“The government of Indonesia wants to move very quickly on this carbon capture and storage,” Coordinating Minister of Maritime and Investment Affairs Luhut Pandjaitan told a CCS forum.
He said the government will issue simple rules of implementation to ensure that investors will be able to quickly execute investments in CCS projects.
Earlier this year, the government issued a regulation allowing CCS operators to set aside 30% of their capacity to store carbon dioxide originating from abroad.
Indonesia has signed a letter of intent with Singapore on cross-border CCS collaboration and is courting countries like Japan and South Korea for similar partnership.
So far Indonesia has approved three development plans for gas projects that each include CCS infrastructure, Dwi Soetjipto, chairman of upstream oil and gas regulator SKK Migas told reporters on the sideline of the forum.
They are BP’s Tangguh project, the Abadi project run by Japan’s INPEX, and the Sakakemang project run by Spain’s Repsol, he said.
Luhut said the next government, which will take office in October, is expected to continue the efforts to develop the CCS industry.
“Whoever the president is, this will be very beneficial for the republic and I think president-elect Prabowo agrees with that and we have also briefed him on that,” said Luhut.
(Reporting by Fransiska Nangoy; Editing by Sonali Paul)
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