Treaty amended to allow carbon burial off Europe

By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO (Reuters) - European nations have amended a maritime treaty to permit burial of greenhouse gases beneath the north-east Atlantic as part of a long-term assault on global warming, Norway said on Thursday.

Governments changed the so-called 1992 OSPAR Convention at a meeting in Ostend, Belgium, so that a ban on "dumping" at sea will not apply to greenhouse gases captured from power plants or factories and then pumped into porous rocks below the seabed.

U.N. studies project that such storage could be a major part of a drive to slow climate change this century and help to clean up emissions from burning coal and oil. But the technology is now too expensive to catch on widely.

"The convention changes are an important milestone," Norwegian Environment Minister Helen Bjoernoy said. OSPAR covers the north-east Atlantic from the North Pole south to Portugal and stretching east to Denmark and west to Greenland.

"Storage of carbon dioxide in geological formations beneath the seabed will be an extremely important tool in the fight against climate change," Bjoernoy said in a statement.

A separate convention governing dumping in the world's oceans, the London Convention, was similarly amended last year. Many oil companies, including Statoil, BP and Shell, have been pushing for changes to OSPAR.

LAST HURDLE

The revision to OSPAR, which combined a 1972 Oslo Convention and a 1974 Paris Convention, was the last hurdle to permit carbon storage in the north-east Atlantic region.

Norway proposed the changes with backing from France, the Netherlands and Britain. OSPAR groups 16 coastal states and the European Commission. The revision will enter into force after ratification by seven nations.

"Experience shows that ratification often takes a while, perhaps between one and five years," Knut Kroepelien, a senior Norwegian Environment Ministry official, told Reuters. "We've not identified that as a problem."

Most projects, such as a Norwegian plan to build gas-fired power plants and then entomb the greenhouse gases offshore, are several years off, he noted.

Statoil has been injecting a million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide at its Sleipner gas field off Norway since 1996 in a pioneering use of the technology, spurred by a hefty carbon dioxide emissions tax.

Statoil is exempted from "dumping" rules because it simply reinjects carbon dioxide from the Sleipner well back into the seabed, rather than bringing the gas from somewhere else. Sleipner is unusual because its natural gas has a high concentration of carbon dioxide.