It’s been an up-and-down week for supporters of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the technology that aims to capture carbon dioxide emitted from power plants and bury it underground.

The European Commission announced yesterday that it would put €50 million towards an investment scheme to co-finance a CCS demonstration plant in China (costing around €300-500 million), fulfilling an agreement made by the EU and China in 2005.

Earlier in the week, the New York Times noted a sea change in China’s attitude towards carbon capture. Noting China’s swift progress on its GreenGen project, Julio Friedmann, head of the carbon storage programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told the paper: “Five years ago, you’d have a discussion [with China] on CCS and you’d meet the ‘C’ team. Now, you meet the ‘A’ team. They take this stuff seriously.”

But in Germany, politicians dropped a pending national CCS legal framework, postponing agreement until after general elections in September. “It’s really frustrating,” Reuters quoted Staffan Goertz, Vattenfall’s chief media officer for CCS. “It is the result of the local public having questions and hesitations about this.”

And in the US, two companies said on Thursday they would withdraw from participating in the government-backed FutureGen CCS project in Mattoon, Illinois. American Electric Power and Southern said they’d rather spend the money on their own CCS projects instead (Reuters).