Norcem/HeidelbergCement in Brevik (with the Aker Solution test unit).
A new report launched today by the think tank Global CCS Institute shows that carbon capture and storage has seen growing momentum in 2019, but Europe remains behind the U.S. The findings were presented at the 25th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Madrid.
The pipeline of projects grew for the second year in a row, reaching now 51 large-scale CCS facilities in operation or under development globally in a variety of industries and sectors. Among those, there are 19 facilities in operation (17 in the industrial sector and two power projects), four under construction and 28 at various stages of development.
The U.S. is currently topping the list with 24 large-scale facilities, followed by Europe and the Asia Pacific region (both at 12) and the Middle East (three).
“Despite this increased momentum and progress in CCS deployment, the number of facilities needs to increase 100- fold by 2040, and scaling efforts are just not happening fast enough,” said Global CCS Institute CEO Brad Page. “Now is the time to rally for greater policy support and for capital to be allocated to build on the positive CCS progress of the past two years.”
Attempts to bring more CCS in Europe are now ongoing amid controversies, as the technology is deeply connected to political decisions in the field of greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2009, the EU launched the European Energy Programme for Recovery (EEPR) with a budget of €1.6 billion to support carbon capture and storage (CCS) and offshore wind projects. At the same time, the EU created the New Entrants’ Reserve 300 (NER300) funded by the sale of 300 million emission allowances (€2.1 billion) to support CCS and innovative renewable energy projects.
Another report published in 2018 by the European Court of Auditors shows that CCS had little success across member states.
One of the conclusions was that: “EEPR fell short of its ambitious carbon capture and storage objectives as none of the projects receiving EU funding demonstrated the technology at commercial scale” and “five out of six co-funded projects were not completed.” Furthermore, they found that “NER300 also does not deliver any successful CCS demonstration projects.”
The reasons behind this failure were varied.
“Uncertainty around long-term climate and energy strategies and the underpinning policies, regulations and public financial support affected projects’ ability to attract private investments and reach final investment decision on time,” said the report. “In addition to the economic and other factors referred to above, the falling market price for carbon emissions under the European emissions trading system (EU ETS) since 2011 was a key barrier for CCS demonstration projects in the EU.” Finally “the failure of any EEPR project to secure an adequate amount of public funding through NER300 or national programmes by 2012 compromised the viability of these projects.”
Some NGOs claim that Europe is not the place for it and fear it is going to drop states’ ambitions.
“There haven't been any successful and economically viable projects in the EU, despite massive funding,” Faiza Oulahsen, head of climate and energy at Greenpeace Netherlands, told Forbes.com. “The price of renewables and battery storage make CCS a bad bet and it used more as a smokescreen to lock-in more fossil fuel infrastructure investments. We also see that is an attempt of the fossil fuel industry to maintain the status quo and block the transition to clean and sustainable energy.”
According to Greenpeace, CCS is also a bad investment. “We are, however, not standing in the way of using CCS to capture pollution from hard to decarbonize sectors like cement manufacturing,” Oulahsen added. “The process of capturing, sequestering, and monitoring carbon underground is expensive. And there lies the problem: companies want (and need) subsidies to make it happen. And then still, the problem remains that is doesn't add any economic value and that it will need subsidies in the long run.”
Others believe that we should go for any existing solution aimed at reducing the presence of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, precisely because politics is not yet ambitious enough.
“This is not rocket science. Creating a market, in cities and through mandates, can pull low carbon industrial products onto the market place and in time replace the carbon intensive alternatives,” Keith Whiriskey, deputy director at the Norwegian NGO Bellona Europe, told Forbes.com.
Demand for low carbon cement and low carbon steel, as well as infrastructures, can help clean production techniques like CCS develop in Europe. These, however, have a higher production cost than traditional polluting alternatives have.
“Requirements for their use could aid the deployment, just as renewable energy requirements have brought wind and solar to the market on an even footing with CO2 intensive fossil electricity generation,” Whiriskey added. “Low carbon industry projects currently under development, such as the shared CO2 pipelines in Rotterdam (PORTHOS) and flexible CO2 shipping in Norway (Northern Lights) can catalyse new low carbon production as follow on projects become easier and quicker.”
Part of the expected €10 billion within the EU Innovation Fund could be used to help build the first low carbon cement, steel and chemicals factories.
“The central issue in Europe is one of infrastructure, pipeline and offshore storage. It is reasonable to believe that those should in part be born with public funds,” senior research scholar at the Center for Global Energy Policy at Columbia University Julio Friedmann told Forbes.com. “I look forward to the day when the EU Commission approves funding for these projects so we can busily get on with capturing and storing the CO2.”
