Debate about lifestyle changes remains at the margins
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), is being proposed as an important step in greening European industry. However, critics say the technology promises much more than it can actually deliver, while costs are significantly higher. By betting too hard on CCS, we risk missing the boat on reforming our society sustainably.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) has become an essential part of European and global climate policy. The logic is simple: we capture CO2 emissions from factories and store them deep underground. This way we save the planet and the industry.
Industrial emissions account for about 25% of European emissions. To become climate neutral by 2050, they must disappear. CCS is also being counted on to green some of the energy sector’s emissions. Governments are willing to provide supportive regulation and invest heavily in it.
However, there are fundamental concerns about the feasibility of the technology, both technically and economically. Its failure could prove disastrous and undermine Europe’s climate strategy altogether.
19,000 kilometers of pipelines
It is argued that if we want to maintain existing industrial capacity, make only minimal changes to production processes, and also meet climate goals, we can only do so by capturing and storing CO2 on a large scale. CCS claims to be ready for this.
The European Commission is therefore fully committed to CCS with an Industrial Carbon Management Strategy. By 2030, the capacity must be available to store 50 million tons of CO2. By 2040 that should rise to 280 million tons, to reach 450 million by 2050. That’s about 13% of the EU’s current total emissions.
Achieving this will require huge investments. Filter systems need to be installed on gas power plants, incinerators, and on cement, hydrogen, chemical and even steel plants. These need to be connected to a network of pipelines, which, according to studies, could total 19,000 km across Europe. Temporary storage terminals should be built in ports, as well as new adapted ships for transportation. Depleted gas and oil fields at least 800 meters underground should be mapped and tested all over Europe to inject CO2 into them for eternity.
Three small-scale CCS projects are currently operating in the EU, capturing about 1 million tons of CO2 per year. Eleven other projects are under construction and should store 4.6 million tons annually. All other projects are still in the design phase.
‘We are trying to get a new technology up and running on a commercial scale,’ says Chris Davies, until recently director of CCS Europe, the industry’s main European lobbying organization. He admits that “the scale-up required is enormous”, but he declares it is “the only way to meet climate targets.
On the technical front, the industry says it can get the job done. ‘We already store methane in large quantities underground for temporary storage and thus the technology of pumping gas into a rock and then pulling it out again is very well understood. We now want to do exactly the same with CO2, only with a view to it not coming back to the surface,’ the lobbyist says.
The challenge, according to Davies, is on the political level. ‘China could decide in a day to roll out the whole CCS infrastructure, but in Europe this is much more difficult. We have to coordinate all the companies and governments involved, develop a revenue model and grant the necessary permits,’ Davies says. He therefore calls for more European leadership to work with member states to both build a legislative framework, and provide financial support.
The European Commission has acceded to some of the lobby groups’ key demands. For example, since 2024, CCS has been given a strategic role in making European industry carbon-neutral, so existing environmental legislation may be relaxed and permits granted more quickly.
Taxpayer should guarantee risk
According to the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), the European CCS network of pipelines could cost 520 billion euros. A quarter of that would be paid for by taxpayers and the rest would eventually be paid off by industry through an allowance on their emissions.
The price to capture and store a ton of CO2 could range from €70 to €200, but could also exceed €550, depending on the purity of the emissions.
However, financing CCS remains a tricky issue. Indeed, investors are only willing to commit to new projects if there are guarantees that companies will put that amount on the table. In practice, this only happens if the government acts as lender of last resort.
According to the Zero Emissions Platform (ZEP), an official European advisory body that brings together various industrial sectors around CCS, the United Kingdom’s policy is therefore a model to follow. ‘The UK government has taken pretty much all of the risk on it by developing a sort of a revenue support agreement, and set aside £22 billion. The result is that banks are falling over themselves to invest and it’s gotten even the most difficult projects off the ground,’ explains Eadbhard Pernot, secretary general of ZEP.
This principle has been applied in the Netherlands and Norway, where two new projects will soon be operational. Porthos, an offshore CO2 storage facility near Rotterdam, will receive a lifeline of 2.1 billion euros from the Dutch state if the project does not achieve its hoped-for revenues. Norway is subsidizing 80% of the operational costs of Northern Lights, a cross-border CO2 transport and storage project, which has already received 870 million euros in public funding.
So without public funding, CCS cannot exist. Eadbhard Pernot acknowledges this, but presents politicians with a stark choice. ‘Either we moan about why Europe’s industries are dying because they are no longer competitive, or we keep those jobs here and invest in a green industry (with CCS; ed.). But that is more expensive than importing emission-intense products from China,’ he argues.
The EU shows its willingness to make this sacrifice. In the period 2020 to 2022, almost 40 percent of the total budget of the Innovation Fund, intended to help industry achieve the Paris climate agreement, went exclusively to CCS projects, largely in the cement industry.
Enhanced oil recovery
It is striking that such a hard bet is being made on a technology about which there are fundamental doubts. It is true that the oil and gas industry has been using processes to capture CO2 on the one hand and inject it into the subsurface on the other since the 1970s.
When methane is extracted, high concentrations of CO2 are sometimes found that must be separated before commercialization. That process is called carbon capture. That captured CO2 can then be injected into oil fields to bring hard-to-extract oil to the surface. This is called enhanced oil recovery or EOR. In this process, 70% of the CO2 comes back to the surface along with the oil.
The gas industry has 47 commercial carbon capture projects worldwide, accounting for 50 million tons per year. Most of it is used for EOR. Only nine projects exist that attempt to permanently store CO2, two of which in Europe.
Yet Andrew Reid says it is entirely wrong to claim that CCS technology has been around for 50 years and can be scaled up immediately. After a career in the oil and gas industry, he chose to commit to the energy transition at the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
‘The extraction of oil and gas is something completely different from the injection of CO2. It is uncharted territory that the industry knows very little about. Every oil or gas field is unique and has different rocks, porosity and temperature. We just don’t know what will happen if you store CO2 long-term. Actually, CCS is little more than a theoretical concept on an engineer’s drawing board,” the expert judges.
Technology in prototype phase
This unpredictability is illustrated by the technical difficulties in Norway, at the only two operational CO2 storage projects on the European continent, associated to the extraction of natural gas. At the Sleipner project in the North Sea, large quantities of CO2 escaped from the reservoir that by chance came to a halt in a much higher, impermeable layer. In the Snøhvit project in the Barents Sea, the pressure of the CO2 became too high so that the project had to be shut down and restarted in a neighboring area. Projects in Algeria (Salah), the U.S. (Texas, Petra Nova) and Australia (Gorgon) also faced unforeseen circumstances that forced the project to be abandoned or ambitions lowered.
There is also much uncertainty about CO2 capture. The technology to separate CO2 from methane is well developed, but especially in the cement industry and at gas power plants, the process is very energy-intensive and the efficiency low. And these are exactly the sectors the EU wants to target with CCS. The industry does claim that 95% of CO2 can be captured, but a study of 16 existing projects found that the percentage averages 49% and never exceeds 80%. Similarly, the International Energy Agency indicates that 66% of planned CO2 capture should happen in sectors where the technology is only at prototype or demonstration stage.
The story about transporting CO2 is similar. The industry has lots of experience sending gas and oil through a pipeline, but transporting CO2 is new. The presence of even minimal amounts of water or water vapor is problematic. In reaction with CO2, that forms carbonic acid that corrodes the pipeline. Since several industries want to dump their CO2 into the European network, it will be very complicated to ensure its purity. Moreover, pipeline leaks cannot be ruled out. And these are toxic to humans and the environment, as was demonstrated by an accident in the United States.
Sustainable lifestyle
Not surprisingly, CCS projects are not a great success.
‘There are only small-scale pilot projects that have failed miserably,’ says Andrew Reid of the IEEFA. ‘Either far less CO2 is captured than initially planned, or something goes wrong with the storage. Moreover, the projects are often much more expensive and complex and therefore not at all efficient to scale up,’ he concludes.
By pushing so hard for CCS, we risk missing the boat.
‘Once it becomes clear that it’s not working, it may be too late to change course that will keep us within our carbon budget,’ Reid argues.
That other direction proposes an industrial policy that is profoundly different from the current one. It refocuses on a circular economy with sustainable use of materials and electrification of industrial processes. This sometimes still involves CCS, but on a much smaller scale.
Also by adopting more sustainable lifestyles, where we use drastically less energy and raw materials, we would emit much less CO2, and CCS would be redundant or only needed on a small scale.
Framing climate debate
It is evident that many economic stakeholders exert pressure to keep business as usual. Also the geopolitical context also inhibits bold climate policy. Yet it remains astonishing that European policy so blindly ignores the risks of the chosen strategy.
Researcher Jeroen Oomen of Utrecht University, co-author of the book Captured Futures, together with Professor Maarten Hajer, sought to explain why politicians are unable to find appropriate answers to the climate crisis.
‘This is not just about economic interests. It touches on deeply held beliefs about how the world works. We are a society based entirely on technological optimism,’ he says.
‘CCS holds the hopeful message that “we are still savable.” The whole climate story has become so apocalyptic that this idea is very appealing. Claiming that technology is not going to solve the problems and that we need to think more broadly and look at socio-cultural questions as well, is very difficult,” Oomen states.
According to Oomen, the whole society is permeated by this mindset, and certainly in places where decisions are made. Policymakers, as well as scientists and journalists, have been trained and raised with a belief in progress, and are judged when they deviate from it.
If we were to understand the climate crisis as a large-scale socio-ecological crisis, we could look at different future scenarios in an open way. These could be about technological solutions as well as changes in the ways we organize our lives. However, this debate remains at the margins.
‘Current climate politics avoids talking about the underlying power relations, because we prefer to see it as a techno-economic problem,’ Oomen says. The climate debate needs to be framed completely differently. ‘We need to evolve toward a society that uses less energy and resources, and that discusses seriously about CO2 for luxury, which we want to phase out, and essential CO2. CCS may play a role in some sectors where the alternatives are very hard to find, but it is certainly not a solution on the scale proposed.’
This article was realized with the support of Journalismfund Europe. It is part of collaborative research on CCS in the EU. Original publication in Dutch for Mondiaal Nieuws.
Teaser image credit: The Heidelberg Brevik Carbon Capture facility, scheduled to start operating in 2025, will be the first commercial-scale use of CCS in cement production. By PutTheKettleOn – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=158089453