World needs rules for burying greenhouse gases: IEA

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - The world needs legal guidelines for burying greenhouse gases to help the still tiny business become one of the main ways of fighting global warming by 2050, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Thursday.

The IEA said pilot projects for capturing gases -- emitted mainly by burning fossil fuels in power plants, refineries, and factories -- now accounted for just 0.05 percent of the potential total by mid-century.

"There is a need...for a worldwide agreement on the legal challenges," Claude Mandil, executive director of the IEA, which advises 26 industrialized nations, told a news briefing in Oslo during a conference on carbon capture and storage.

He said most IEA estimates showed that carbon capture would be the top contributor to curbing greenhouse gases by 2050, behind only energy efficiency savings and ahead of renewable energies and nuclear power.

Until now, most work has focused on ways of cutting the prohibitively high costs of capturing, piping away and entombing the gases under a broader U.N. goal of averting climate change such as more droughts, floods and rising sea levels.

But a legal framework was also urgently needed, in tandem with development of cheaper technologies, Mandil said.

He noted that most projects so far were small, such the Sleipner gas field off Norway where Statoil has been filtering out and reinjecting about a million tons of carbon dioxide a year since 1996 to avoid a carbon emissions tax.

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