Europe ‘needs binding targets for CCS’

Or, should geological storage space be reserved for ‘negative emission’ technologies?

Two recent papers investigating carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology have reached different conclusions on how the technology should be applied in the future. One suggests that binding targets in Europe are needed, while another takes a less conventional view that caution should be applied before filling up geological carbon sequestration space with carbon stripped from burning coal; instead saving it for carbon dioxide from negative emission technologies.

A report for the European Commission (EC) as part of a review into its CCS Directive, from consultancy Ricardo-AEA, says that there is a ‘genuine and urgent’ need for CCS technology in Europe, and argues for roadmaps for the technology to be developed by EU countries.

The EC is due to present a final report into progress on the CCS Directive to the European Parliament and Council later this month. The Ricardo-AEA report says that progress in CCS since the Directive was drawn up in 2009 has been slow. In 2009, when the Directive was set up, there was an expectation that 12 large-scale CCS projects would be up and running in Europe by now. This is clearly not the case, with just two operating in Norway. 

The report suggests that the low carbon price over the last five years in Europe has not helped CCS project confidence. It recommends that the European Commission develop an EU roadmap for CCS with binding targets for 2030, and that it integrates CCS in the on-going 2030 national roadmaps. It also recommends that a review of Europe’s carbon dioxide storage capability is conducted. 

Another report suggests a different path – that it might be wasteful to use storage space for carbon dioxide captured from burning fossil fuels. Instead, it says that large-scale deployment of coal and gas CCS could constrain ‘last resort’ negative emissions in the future. 

The report, Stranded Carbon Assets and Negative Emissions Technologies, from the University of Oxford’s Stranded Assets Programme, says that ‘Negative Emissions Technologies’ (NETs), for example using CCS with biomass to capture carbon from the atmosphere and then bury it underground, while producing power, should not be overlooked – and in fact should be planned for now.

NETs may help to extend carbon budgets and therefore provide more time to reduce emissions. They may also provide an option to bring back concentrations of carbon dioxide towards less risky levels should total emissions overshoot, says the report.

The report also finds that industrial NETs that rely on CCS such as direct air capture, ocean liming, and bioenergy CCS, are likely to have very limited potential by 2050, largely due to limits imposed by technology development and more significant technical and policy challenges. But after 2050, the cumulative technical potential of these CCS-dependent technologies could be significant. The key bottleneck to this would then be CCS infrastructure and geological storage. 

The research finds that between now and 2050, there may be the technical potential to attain negative emissions of the order of 120 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide cumulatively, with the majority of this potential coming from afforestation, soil carbon improvements, and biochar. 

• In a setback for the CCS industry the US’ FutureGen 2.0 CCS project, which would have seen an Illinois coal-fired power plant retrofitted with CCS technology, has been cancelled. BusinessGreen reported that the US Department of Energy pulled funding for the $1.7bn project, stating that it would not meet the September deadline for federal funding.