Reuters Summit-Tokyo Electric to use carbon market beyond 2012

(For other news from the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit, click on http://www.reuters.com/summit/GlobalClimateandAlternativeEnergy0 9?pid=500)

TOKYO, Sept 8 - Tokyo Electric Power Co <9501.T> expects to keep buying carbon credits overseas beyond 2012, when the first phase of the Kyoto climate pact ends, the company's climate section chief said, underscoring the firm's continued reliance on the global emissions trading market.

TEPCO, Asia's biggest utility, is already one of the top buyers of globally traded carbon credits under the protocol's market schemes to help Japan, the world's No.5 greenhouse gas emitter, to meet its Kyoto commitments.

TEPCO has redeemed 24.8 million tonnes of such credits to offset 20 percent of its CO2 emissions in the past year.

It is now considering how to meet a tough CO2 intensity goal that a 10-company industry lobby, the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, has voluntarily committed itself to achieve in the year starting April 2020.

"We see a rocky road ahead as the industry-wide 2020 target will need to be met mainly by our own efforts," Yoshihiro Kageyama, general manager of TEPCO's environment department, said at the Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.

But he did not say when the company's 2020 target would be announced.

"We'll set a new target in a bottom-up approach of what we can do by ourselves first. If it's no good under certain conditions, we'll have to use a scheme to supplement it with something similar to carbon credits ... that we now use to meet our target under the Kyoto Protocol," he said in an interview.

TEPCO's self-imposed goal for the 2008-2012 Kyoto period was in line with the power sector's target of generating 20 percent less CO2 per kilowatt hour per year on average than the 1990 level, in which each firm can use carbon credits from abroad.