While the urgency to reduce carbon dioxide emissions has diminished somewhat in the United States for now due to the current political climate, many other regions of the world have strong reduction mandates in place. As a result, international efforts to evaluate technologies and the business issues of carbon capture and sequestration are picking up steam.

Recent activities including a $1.27 billion commercial-scale carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) program that got underway in Saskatchewan, Canada, in April. The province approved the plans by utility SaskPower to rebuild a coal-fired unit at its Boundary Dam site, capture CO2, and use that CO2 to recover crude oil from nearby oil fields.

The new generating unit at Boundary Dam will have the capacity to generate 110 megawatts of electricity. Dubbed the Boundary Dam Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage Demonstration Project, the goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about one million tons per year. The carbon capture technology is expected to become operational in 2014.

In March, a new $148 million dollar European Union pilot was launched for a power plant in Brindisi, Italy. There, Enel, Italy’s largest electric operator and Europe’s second largest utility, plans to deploy an innovative pilot CCS plant at its Federico II power plant. The CCS plant will be able to treat 10,000 cubic meters of exhaust per hour from the Federico II coal plant, separating out 2.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide per hour, up to a maximum of 8,000 metric tons per year.

The captured CO2 will be transported to another site where it will be injected and permanently stored underground. The company expects to pilot will provide useful know-how to support future applications of the technology at other plants, as well as providing information to scale the technology to handle a larger capacity. The design stage of the program has been completed; plant is expected to be operational next year.

Efforts in the U.S. continue, but with some possible constraints. Notably, the American Electric Power sequestration demonstration project at the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia continues to evaluate CCS technologies and business issues. However, Nature recently reported that there is a battle over funding to scale up this project.