Bellona invited to a CCS Forum on 15 September in Oslo in order to discuss the status of CCS in Europe. Which projects are progressing the fastest? And which countries are endorsing rules for storing CO₂?

Frederic Hauge opened the meeting with an introduction to the work the EU’s energy Commissioner Güenther Oettinger is leading on drawing up a road map for decarbonizing the EU energy sector by 2050. Hauge put CCS into context and spoke about the need for CCS on industrial emission sources and power plants running on biomass. He also raised question if we need to allocate underground storage capacity to industrial emissions and “carbon-negative” emissions, instead of CO₂ from conventional power production with CCS. Closing his speech, he pointed to China where the cost of producing solar panels have dropped by half since January, and noted that solar is now becoming very competitive.

Paal Frisvold followed up giving an overview of ongoing processes in the EU. He pointed out that yes, some demonstration projects are being stalled and even cancelled. “This is a natural process when the competition is hardening”.

Eivind Hoff gave the first presentation of the afternoon where he took us on a “tour-de-CCS-EU”. He started out by providing information on the various demonstration projects and finished off giving his personal analysis on the probability of success for the listed projects. The presentation gives a good overview on the status of implementation of the Storage Directive, political processes, partners, political support and progress in the various Member States.

July 15^th, the ZEP report on the cost of CCS was released. It is the first CCS cost report based on original European raw data and confirms that CCS will be cost-competitive with a series of other low-carbon energy technologies starting from around 2020. It also finds that under realistic fuel cost assumptions, CCS-equipped gas-fired power plants will produce electricity at about the same price as CCS-equipped coal-fired power plants. Download the presentation Hoff gave from the report here.

Marek Zaborowski, director of Bellona Polska presented Bellona’s newly published CCS roadmap for Poland A CCS roadmap for Poland – Insuring energy independence. Poland is rapidly approaching a decision point at which it will have to take action to secure its future energy supply. Much of its power generation units will require replacement within one or two decades, and before that time critical choices will have to be made regarding the country’s utilisation of coal and lignite resource, in the context of increasingly strict EU regulation of CO₂ emissions. Bellona seeks to support decision-making by establishing roadmaps for CCS demonstration and deployment in key European countries, one of these countries being Poland. Zaborowski presented the key conclusions from the roadmap noting that even in the scenarios with a low CO₂ price, coal with CCS is economically justified and cheaper in 2050 than not applying CCS. Investing in this technology can serve as an insurance policy for Poland, putting the country in a position to freely choose between coal, lignite, gas and renewables in its near and medium term energy mix. With the EU currently offering generous funding for CCS demonstration projects from the NER300, moving forward with proposed projects such as Bełchatów is critical.

John Nustad from Aker Clean Carbon gave a presentation on the CCS progress in EU and beyond from an industrial perspective. Nustad gave an overview of Aker Clean Carbon’s ongoing projects in Scotland (Longannet), US, Germany (RDK 8), Italy (Porto Tolle) and Norway (Mongstad TCM). In his presentation he raised a challenge to policy makers at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Durban that they must send a clear message to the world “Emitting CO₂ will no longer be free”.

Bellona would like to thank Gassnova for sponsoring lunch.