Insights and Commentaries
Introducing the CCS Legal and Regulatory indicator
15th September 2015
Topic(s): Carbon capture, law and regulation, Policy, use and storage (CCUS)
Early consideration of the legal and regulatory barriers to carbon capture and storage (CCS) can be traced back to the 2005 publication of two seminal reports. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Special Report on CCS, and the International Energy Agency’s “Legal Aspects of Storing CO2” emphasised the role law and regulation would need to play in the development of CCS technology.
In the intervening 10 years, policymakers and regulators have made progress in addressing legal obstacles to the deployment of CCS. International climate and marine agreements have been amended to explicitly accommodate the technology. Across North America, Australia and Europe, regulators have developed regional, national and sub-national regulatory frameworks for CCS activities.
Evaluating national frameworks
The scope and pace of legal and regulatory development in many regions and jurisdictions is encouraging; however, there have been few attempts at assessing the status and effectiveness of those developments. As projects progress into an operational phase and utilise legal frameworks, or where policymakers and regulators seek to compare national approaches and consider analogous models, these types of assessments will prove increasingly necessary and beneficial.
In order to provide a comprehensive assessment of jurisdictions’ legal frameworks, the Global CCS Institute has released an Indicator that examines a broad range of legal and regulatory factors likely to be critical throughout the project life-cycle. These factors address a broad spectrum of administrative and permitting arrangements across the project life-cycle, as well as issues relating to environmental assessments, public consultation and long-term liability.
A global perspective on the status of law and regulation
Australia, Canada, Denmark, United Kingdom and the United States have been assessed by the Indicator as having highly-developed CCS-specific laws, or existing laws that are applicable across most parts of the CCS project cycle, and as a consequence have all received high Indicator assessment scores.
The detailed nature of these national models is perhaps unsurprising, particularly when considering national policy commitments and the role many of these countries have taken in stewarding CCS-specific legal and regulatory development at the regional and international level.
For the majority of countries, however, the assessment reveals that national legal regimes have limited or very few CCS-specific or existing laws applicable across aspects of the CCS project life-cycle. These results are not limited to one particular region however, with Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia Pacific and the Americas all demonstrating a wide range of approaches and levels of legal and regulatory development.
Significant opportunity for development
While the Indicator highlights the success of some jurisdictions in developing comprehensive legal and regulatory regimes to support CSS technology deployment, it is evident that no individual country has developed an entirely comprehensive model, which could serve as a benchmark for those currently designing legal frameworks. These assessment results clearly demonstrate that even for the top five high-scoring countries, there are clear opportunities to further develop and improve legal and regulatory models.
The large majority of countries assessed by the Indicator have been declared to have incomplete or partial legal and regulatory frameworks for the technology. A perhaps more positive finding however, is that even among the Indicator’s lower-scoring nations current legal regimes contain aspects which may support and facilitate the regulation of CCS. Subject to further policy commitments and subsequent legislative intervention, it would appear that all of the countries assessed have some national legislation which may afford a foundation for more CCS-specific models.
Scale and urgency of future development
These results clearly emphasise the significant development that has taken place in some jurisdictions in recent years. Despite strong policy commitments to the technology however, several countries have received assessment scores at the lower end of the Indicator’s spectrum. While the Indicator only contemplates national legal and regulatory capacity, these results will likely concern nations with CCS projects in the pipeline, or which view CCS as an intrinsic component of their emissions reduction policy.
The Indicator presents a significant opportunity to all countries to progress and improve their legal and regulatory frameworks for CCS. In many of the higher-scoring jurisdictions, this will entail minor amendments and further refinement of recently-enacted models. For other countries however, the magnitude of the task is likely to be far more significant. The scale of this development will clearly depend upon a number of factors, however the pressing need to afford legal and regulatory support to early projects in many jurisdictions, will likely prove an important consideration for several jurisdictions.
For further information on the Institute’s Legal and Regulatory Indicator, please contact Mr. Ian Havercroft, Senior Adviser – Legal and Regulatory legal@globalccsinstitute.com