In a new plan released on Tuesday (06/02/2024), Brussels confirmed it is investing in some of the world's biggest polluting companies to invest massively in new technology to capture carbon and store it for millennia. as part of their strategy to achieve climate neutrality.
The technology concerned with removing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere is called “Carbon Dioxide Removal” (CDR) or “Direct Air Capture” (DAC).
New legislation also finalized Tuesday (06/02), the Net-Zero Industry Act, will enshrine the request (with some caveats) into law.
There is a justification for this. Companies like Shell and ExxonMobil have the money, engineering know-how, and facilities needed to rapidly develop an embryonic industry that is not profitable (yet) but could help with the climate issue.
The strategy "is exactly what the EU needs," said Eve Tamme, who chairs the Zero Emissions Platform, an organization that advises the EU on carbon capture technology.
Its own scientific advisers — and even some climate-focused NGOs — admit that carbon sequestration will be needed to meet the EU's goal of climate neutrality by 2050. Energy-hungry industries such as steel, cement and chemical industry cannot be easily carbonized and will not disappear. Carbon capture could help them, and fossil fuel companies can help make this technology a reality.
Carbon sequestration, at least in theory, is far from new.
For decades, big companies have been touting their CO2 absorption capabilities, presenting it as an ideal way to reconcile economic growth and environmental standards without having to rethink the way industrial facilities operate.
However, carbon sequestration can mean many different things and has never been proven to work on a large scale.
It may mean trapping emissions before they are released, which is more cost-effective. Or it can mean literally removing carbon from the atmosphere, a less tested and precise approach.
Once that coal is captured, it takes an entire network to package it: a sophisticated pipeline system, skilled workers, storage facilities.
Domien Vangenechten, an expert on carbon sequestration at climate policy think tank E3G, argued that the collapse was "a failure more of the regulatory environment than of the technology". Countries were uncertain investors, Vangenechten said, while EU pricing for carbon pollution plummeted, reducing financial incentives to cover emissions.
Times have changed, and the idea of applying a huge vacuum cleaner to dirty steel, cement and chemical manufacturers is back in vogue. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, defines carbon sequestration as one of many ways to keep global temperatures within the Paris Agreement limit.
Europe too, is increasingly worried about losing local industries as China and the US pump money into their own manufacturing.
So for carbon sequestration to become a reality, the EU has decided that it must have fossil fuel companies take the lead, investing some of their huge profits in its development.
The EU plan, released on 06/02, estimates that the EU should sequester 280 million tonnes of CO2 by 2040 and around 450 million tonnes by 2050, a far cry from today's minimum capacity.
However, it avoids setting clear targets on issues such as how many carbon capture facilities Europe needs, and in which countries, and focuses on the need to develop the entire network from capture to storage.
In Greece, six sites with potential geological storage of carbon dioxide have been identified. In addition to Energean's CO2 storage project in Prinos, with a budget of 1 billion euros, which has already been included in the Projects of Common Interest (PCI), EKETA scientists have identified other areas for the installation of capture, utilization technologies and carbon storage or CO2 storage in our country.
The first agreements in principle for the storage of carbon dioxide in the planned underground storage in a depleted Prinos field (operated by Energean) have already been signed, according to market sources, with companies from the cement and refinery sectors, while intense the interest from the energy production sector as well.
Beyond Prinos, there is geological interest in the areas of Grevena, Western Thessaloniki and Volos.
But for green European politicians, the companies' involvement in the project is a reason to want to avoid the lure of carbon sequestration.
"It's a very expensive technology," German Green MEP Michael Bloss said on Tuesday, "......and it's good for gas and coal companies."
source: zougla.gr (Gianna Myrat)
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