The European Commission has finally acknowledged the absence of carbon capture and storage (CCS) from its emissions-reduction strategy but much remains to be done, writes Chris Davies.
Chris Davies is the director of CCS Europe. He was the European Parliament’s CCS rapporteur in 2008-2009 and 2013-2014.
It has been a long time coming but the European Commission has at last recognised that it has a gaping hole at the heart of its climate policy.
The absence of carbon capture and storage (CCS) from its emissions-reduction strategy has left it without a credible means of achieving its CO2 net-zero ambition, and this despite the authoritative voice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) many times insisting that the technology will be needed.
But acceptance is now taking the place of reluctance, targets are being set, and the outline of a CCS deployment strategy is starting to take shape.
The Commission’s past reluctance may have grown from the sense that involvement with CCS was a career killer.
It was as long ago as January 2007 that the Commission made a promise to design a mechanism to stimulate the construction and operation by 2015 of up to 12 large-scale CCS demonstration projects. Not a single one has even been started since then, let alone completed.
A funding support mechanism, the NER300, failed to deliver, and a billion euros made available from a 2009 economic recovery programme ended up with little to show for it.
Environmental NGOs, alleging that CCS was simply a means of supporting the continued use of fossil fuels, delighted in their mockery of the technology.
Reducing CO2 emissions from coal power stations was the foundation for 2007 thinking.
Since then, the subsidies paid to encourage the successful development of renewable energy systems have moved the dial, reducing (but not always eliminating) the dependency of many Member States on fossil fuels.
The focus now is on the use of CCS technology to curb emissions from energy-intensive and hard-to-abate industry sectors.
The cement industry,