Jakarta. Japan is open to partner with Indonesia on carbon dioxide transport, something that will enable Tokyo to store its captured emissions in the Southeast Asian country, according to its government official.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has emerged as one of the many ways economies can save the planet. The technology captures emissions produced by industrial facilities and stores them into deep geological formations. The captured carbon dioxide may even be transported via ships or pipelines to other locations or even abroad -- something that can turn Indonesia into a regional CCS hub. 

The government-owned Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security (JOGMEC) has backed nine CCS projects, five of which are domestically based. The four others are overseas storage, three of which are located in Indonesia’s close neighbor Malaysia. Another project explores the potential of transporting and storing carbon to offshore depleted oil fields in the Oceanian region by ship or pipelines. The Jakarta Globe asked Hiroshi Hasegawa -- a senior official at the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Industry -- whether Tokyo was eyeing some cross-border carbon storage opportunities with Indonesia.

“Indonesia is a big potential partner,” Hasegawa told a press conference in Jakarta. 

Hasegawa admitted that Indonesia and Japan had yet to ink a government-to-government memorandum of understanding (MoU) on the cross-border storage. He, however, stated that the lack of MoU did not matter, saying that both countries have been seeing “open and continuous communication”. 

Last year, then-President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo signed a decree on CCS that mandates operators to dedicate 70 percent of their storage capacity for domestic needs. Operators may only set aside the remaining 30 percent for imported carbon. However, Indonesia only allows emitters who have invested in the country to use its storage capacity. Companies that are affiliated with the investors may transport their emissions. 

“So by cross-border, it does not mean we are entirely storing other countries’ emissions. It is about building a storage that we can share,” analyst Mohammad Rachmat Sule said.