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Japan has led two major regional summits this month to promote carbon capture technologies, an effort that climate groups say could create a smokescreen for the continued use of fossil fuels.

Last week, Tokyo hosted the Japan CCUS Summit, focused on “carbon capture, utilisation and storage”, a conference that was attended by major domestic and international oil and gas firms, as well as government officials from the UK, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and South Australia.

The day after, energy ministers from Japan, Australia and nine Southeast Asian countries met in Kuala Lumpur under the Asia Zero Emission Community (AZEC), an initiative that Japan launched in 2023 to propel decarbonisation but has since been criticised as promoting and prolonging fossil fuel use.

In a joint statement, AZEC ministers confirmed their commitment to the COP28 deal in Dubai, in which countries agreed to transition away from fossil fuels, while also accelerating carbon capture. The AZEC statement stresses the importance of “various and practical pathways” to achieving carbon neutrality.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) encompasses abatement technologies that capture the CO2 emissions of fossil fuel projects at the production site. While CCS is regarded as a solution to reduce emissions in sectors that are difficult to decarbonise like steel or cement, it has so far proved expensive, and capture rates have been lower than expected.

In the lead-up to the COP30 climate summit in Brazil next month, there are concerns about what Tokyo’s enthusiasm for CCUS means for broader emissions reduction efforts.

“There’s a lot of diplomatic muscle that Japan is deploying behind the promotion of CCS,” said James Bowen, a climate and energy policy analyst at Climate Analytics, a research organisation. “Japan has already played a significant role in previous COPs in pushing this idea of abated fossil fuels being a viable alternative to fossil fuel phaseout.”

    According to the Japanese government’s 7th Strategic Energy Plan published earlier this year, CCUS can support decarbonisation in sectors where electrification is hard to achieve only with renewables, by abating emissions from fossil fuel sources.

    “CCUS is indispensable for simultaneously achieving energy security, economic growth and decarbonisation,” the plan says, adding that Japan will consider support systems to encourage investment and develop suitable sites, among other things.

    Climate Home News contacted Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication.

    Lifeline for fossil fuels

    The latest AZEC declaration adopts language often used by Japan to signal that it and other countries, especially in the Global South, “have to have (their) own pathway to reach net zero”, due to specific “limitations” and “conditions”, said Makiko Arima, a senior finance campaigner at Oil Change International, which recently published a fact sheet on Japanese financing of CCS.

    Arima sees Japan’s approach as a smokescreen for continued justification for fossil fuels under the guise of decarbonisation.

    Investing in CCS risks diverting resources from clean energy adoption in Southeast Asia, where renewables could make up around 90% of the power supply by mid-century but 99% of solar and wind energy potential remained untapped, according to a 2023 Ember report.

    AZEC has led some progress on clean energy in Southeast Asia, with several recent agreements on solar energy, for example. But there is “a concerningly high share of various fossil technology-related agreements and projects”, said Hanna Hakko, senior policy advisor at climate change think-tank E3G.

    For example, out of 17 projects in Indonesia focused on new and existing power facilities and industrial energy projects, seven were related to improving the efficiency and carbon footprint of existing fossil fuel power plants, including co-firing of alternative fuels with coal and gas, an E3G assessment of AZEC’s first years, published prior to last week’s ministerial meeting, shows.

    Comment: Is “hard-to-abate” really that hard – or is it a justification for delay?

    Among the almost 50 memoranda of understanding announced at the meeting this month, six are specifically focused on carbon capture and at least another three refer to it as one of several targeted technologies.

    Of the projects announced this year, eight are directly related to fossil fuels, while another two are related to technologies often used to abate fossil fuels such as ammonia and CCS, while not explicitly mentioning fossil fuel-related use.

    Later this month, another AZEC summit in Malaysia will bring together the heads of government of its 11 member states.

    Costly and controversial technology

    Carbon capture projects worldwide have so far failed to meet expectations due to exorbitant costs and technical hurdles. While scenarios aligned with the Paris Agreement goals assume CO2 capture rates of 95% or more in CCUS projects, real-world results have hovered around 50% on average.

    Because of this under-performance, according to a report by Climate Analytics, “if Asian countries were to follow a high-CCS pathway, it could lead to additional cumulative GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions of almost 25 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent by 2050″ – or more than double China’s annual emissions.

    “People will eventually understand that [CCS is] an expensive and failure-prone technology and diverts attention away from more viable climate and economic strategies,” said Bowen, who worked on the report. “But in the meantime, it will delay climate action.”

    While other regional players such as China and South Korea are also investing in carbon capture, Japan is leading the way. The world’s fifth-largest emitter aims to launch the technology commercially by the end of this decade and capture 120 million-240 million tonnes per annum (mtpa) of CO2 by mid-century. At the moment, all the world’s CCS plants combined can hold about 51 mtpa.

    A carbon capture and storage facility in Hokkaido, Japan, where CO2 is captured and then shipped to Southeast Asian countries. (Photo: ERIA)

    A carbon capture and storage facility in Hokkaido, Japan, where CO2 is captured and then shipped to Southeast Asian countries. (Photo: ERIA)

    “One of the big drivers for pushing CCS is that it benefits high-emitting sectors, like coal-fired power plants, that the (Japanese) government doesn’t want to phase out,” said Ayumi Fukakusa, executive director of Friends of the Earth Japan, which contributed to Oil Change International’s research.

    According to Fukakusa, the prevailing narrative is that Japan is not competitive in clean energy sectors, therefore its industries want to continue leveraging their perceived advantage in fossil fuel-based technologies.

    While they don’t necessarily believe carbon capture will generate significant economic advantages – hence the reliance on Japanese government subsidies – “they can buy time by promoting CCS,” Fukakusa believes.

    Business-as-usual energy policy

    Over the past 11 years, Tokyo has spent $5.2 billion in public funds on domestic and overseas carbon capture – including blue hydrogen, where hydrogen is produced from natural gas and CO2 is captured in the process, according to Oil Change International. Its report frames Japan’s CCS policy as perpetuating fossil fuel-based industries while diverting finance from proven climate solutions such as renewable energy.

    The country has also explored ways to ship captured CO2 to underground or undersea storage sites thousands of kilometres away in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Australia.

    Carbon colonialism? Malaysia and Indonesia plan storage hubs for Asian emissions

    At last week’s AZEC ministerial meeting, a memorandum of understanding was announced between the Japanese economy ministry and the Malaysian government that foresees bilateral discussions through a joint committee to co-operate on carbon capture, including cross-border CCS.

    “It’s very hard to imagine wide-scale uptake of CCS [in Southeast Asia] in the near future, whether supported by AZEC or not,” E3G’s Hakko added. “All these CCS-related initiatives and events are really part of Japan’s longer-term approach to energy policy.”

    Consistent with the Japanese government’s approach of pushing “various realistic pathways”, according to Arima of Oil Change International, CCS is “giving a spin to not actually changing much, but making it seem that they’re addressing” the need to reduce climate-heating emissions.

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    Japan uses “diplomatic muscle” to push carbon capture as fossil fuel panacea

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    Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs

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    October 20, 2026

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    Three countries have been named by the Paris Agreement’s compliance committee for failing to submit a nationally determined contribution (NDC) and repeatedly snubbing offers of help with their climate plans.

    After months of internal debate over whether to identify serial non-responders, the Paris Agreement’s Implementation and Compliance Committee (PAICC) named the three countries which have failed to engage with it over their NDCs on Friday.

    It named Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal and North Korea in a footnote of its annual report, adding that it decided to name them “with a view to facilitating engagement”, adding that representatives of the three nations had been invited to its meeting in early 2027 “with the purpose of identifying any challenges and constraints”.

    “The Committee noted the importance of Parties engaging with the Committee in a timely manner, while noting that some delays may be due to the national capabilities and circumstances of the Parties”, the report said.

      In July, PAICC said 12 countries had ignored its repeated attempts to discuss why they had not published an NDC as required every five years under the 2015 Paris accord.

      Members of the committee had been divided over whether to name them, but at a September meeting decided to do so in their annual report to the annual climate COP summit.

      By the time the report was published on Friday, only Congo, Senegal and North Korea “had not communicated an NDC or submitted a [Biennial Transparency Report] and had not yet responded to any of the Committee’s notifications, despite several reminders issued by the Committee in this regard”.

      Rainforest and renewable energy ambitions

      The silence from Congo and Senegal is notable because the former is home to much of the Congo Basin rainforest while the latter has sought billions of dollars in climate finance to support its renewable energy ambitions.

      After Brazil, Congo has more rainforest than any country in the world. This forest, and the country’s peatlands, absorb huge amounts of greenhouse gas but are fast being lost to expanding farmland, charcoal production, logging and mining.

      Senegal signed a Just Energy Transition Partnership with Canada and wealthy European nations in 2023, to help it meet its renewable energy targets under the-then government of Macky Sall. It was chair of the Least Developed Countries group between January 2022 and December 2023.

      Greenpeace campaigner Raoul Monsembula in the peatland forest around Mbandaka, Democratic Republic of Congo, on September 15, 2017 (Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace)

      Tejas Rao, who is researching the PAICC as part of a doctoral thesis at Cambridge University, said the governments of the three countries should engage with the committee.

      “Engagement costs these governments very little and the committee has shown it will listen,” he said.

      “Silence leaves the committee with no basis to help, and it leaves the [governments] exposed to the narrative that they are simply disengaged,” he told Climate Home News.

      Paris Agreement requirement

      The 2015 Paris Agreement requires all parties to publish an NDC every five years outlining their emissions reduction targets, with each plan meant to be more ambitious than the country’s last NDC.

      The latest set – the third round of plans, with new targets for 2035 – was due in February 2025. While most countries missed this deadline, all but around 30 – mostly small emitters but including Egypt, Vietnam and Argentina – have now submitted them.

      Over the year, the PAICC – which is made up of government climate officials from developed and developing countries – has been communicating with governments that have not submitted NDCs and trying to overcome barriers to them doing so.

      Some nations have cited exceptional circumstances as the reason for not submitting an NDC, a process that requires a significant amount of work in tracking emissions and consulting on how to curb them across the economy. For example, a letter from a Sudanese official to the PAICC, seen by Climate Home News, said that the country’s civil war had led to the suspension of its NDC preparation.

        The US and Iran are not signed up to the Paris Agreement and so do not have active NDCs, nor does Taiwan, which is not a UN member state.

        Rao said that because the PAICC is “facilitative and non-punitive”, naming the countries “is meant to open a door, not close one – the invited consultation is the point”.

        “In recent months, governments that explained their constraints, whether capacity, finance or domestic process, have been met with follow-up and support rather than sanction, and the number of silent governments has fallen sharply,” Rao said.

        The post Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs appeared first on Climate Home News.

        Paris Agreement committee names three countries snubbing it over NDCs