The financial, technical and legislative hurdles faced by most carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects across Europe make them too expensive to operate commercially, said a think tank report published on Thursday.
Reliance on CCS to reach net-zero emissions in Europe may prove costly and ineffective, leaving taxpayers to shoulder up to EUR 140bn in subsidies, according to the report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
“Relying on CCS as a climate solution will force European governments to introduce eye-wateringly high subsidies to prop up a technology that has a history of failure,” said Andrew Reid, the report’s author and IEEFA analyst. “As the small number of operational projects show, CCS is not likely to work as hoped and will take longer to implement than expected.”
The IEEFA pegged the total cost of the continent’s planned CCS projects at EUR 520bn. While carbon trading schemes might cover around 75% of this, some EUR 140bn is likely to come from public funds.
Europe currently has fewer than 200 planned CCS projects, which aim to capture and store over 150m tonnes of CO2, but most of these are in early stages of development, and the proposed timelines are “overoptimistic”, the report said.
By 2030, around 90 CCS facilities will need to be operational to meet the EU and the UK’s carbon capture goals, but at present, only three CCS projects are operational within the EU and none in the UK, the IEEFA said.
Reid warned that doubling down on CCS may leave Europe short of options to reduce emissions in time.
“Policymakers should begin working urgently to put more practical solutions in place,” he added.
Key for transition
CCS is a crucial technology for the energy transition, particularly in reducing carbon emissions from hard-to-abate industries such as steel, glass and ceramics, an industry source said.
Electrifying heavy industries with renewables is not feasible, he added.
“How do you power blast furnaces, glass, ceramics and steel with solar panels? Those factories can’t run on renewables. So if you want to reduce their emissions right away, this is one way to do it,” he said.
Alternatives such as green hydrogen are currently far too expensive and complex, he noted.
“So in the meantime, why not use [CCS] since it’s a safe, tested and risk-free technology?”
source: montel news
Comments