Doha Dispatches: Carbon captured in the desert sands by Giles Parkinson

DOHA: Imagine the biggest Ford pick-up truck you have ever seen, and in its tray is a sprawling concoction of tubes and boxes that make up what could be the world’s first mobile carbon capture and storage technology for vehicles

The prototype, cumbersome and inefficient, apparently reduces emissions from this gas-guzzling monster by just 10 per cent. When refined, a more compact version may achieve a 60 per cent reduction – and the bottled Co2 can be returned to the petrol station to be used as a feedstock for algae. This is either a work of genius in progress or an act of the greatest futility.

Did anyone think of an electric vehicle? In a country like Qatar, it is a silly question. The price of petrol is so low it is not even advertised (the cab driver told me it was 75 rial – or 20c a litre). An EV as a cost hedge on rising fuel costs simply doesn’t make sense when you can refill your SUV for less than $15 a tank. As a status symbol, though you coud buy the Tesla Roadster, perhaps the yellow one sitting under a solar-charging car-port about 100m away for the Ford pickup. Just the sort of car for those to whom money is no object – and in oil and gas rich Qatar, there there are plenty of those.

If you do choose to hold the annual climate change negotiations in a country that is the biggest exporter of gas in the world, and has as its neighbour the biggest exporter of oil, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine what the dominant of many of the discussions should be – the promotion of carbon capture and storage as a fix for the world greenhouse gas emissions.

One quick glance at the Sustainability Expo that runs with the COP18 climate change conference confirms that. This is an exhibition – where the pickup and the Tesla could be found - that is dominated by the Gulf nations and a single technology, CCS, and overwhelmed by the corporate power of the fossil fuel giants that pervades over this conference, and are still desperate to burn as much oil and gas as they can. Renewables hardly get a look in.

It should be recognised that the world’s biggest exporters of fossil fuels are investing heavily in solar technologies, so much so that they might have the greatest influence of over the cost curve of new technologies such as large scale solar thermal and concentrated solar PV than any other country. But they do so with one single goal in mind – to free up as much of their oil and gas as they can so they can export it to other countries.