A recent report from the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, entitled The Critical Decade: International Action on Climate Change, forecast that by 2013 33 nations and regions or “sub-nations,” such as the state of California, will have some level of carbon tax or emissions trading scheme.  To many this will come as something of a surprise.  The European Union (EU), with its emissions trading scheme across 27 sovereign nations, has been at the forefront of efforts to curb carbon dioxide emissions.  In July 2012 Australia launched its carbon tax (not a trading scheme), which will penalize the country’s top 40 polluters for their emissions.  Most people, however, would be hard pushed to name any other nation with the same level of commitment.

The table below, reprinted from the Critical Decade report, highlights that the EU and Australia are increasingly not alone.

(Source: Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, Australia)

The flip side to this increased focus on reducing carbon dioxide emissions is that, industrially at least, the demand for carbon dioxide as an input into processes is growing.  With many nations progressively focused on the notion of energy independence, the pressure to increasingly extract all useful local resources is also growing.  In the fossil fuel industry, both enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and enhanced coal bed methane recovery use compressed CO₂ as an input.  Among the key barriers to expanded deployments of CO₂-based EOR are the lack of economic CO₂, the lack of cost-effective method of sequestering and transporting it, and the cost of compressing the gas.

To put this in context, according to the U.S. National Energy Technologies Laboratory, in 2008 the United States produced 90 million barrels of oil using CO₂-based EOR, and in total has spent a staggering $1 billion on 2,200 miles of CO₂ transmission and distribution pipeline infrastructure.

Surely at some point in the not too distant future it will be economic, and possibly even revenue generating, for companies to capture their CO₂ and sell it on to companies for use in enhanced fuel production.  If the full economic benefits, externalities included, of energy independence are also taken into the equation, then we could well see CO₂ become a valuable commodity.