”This is a historical day for CCS, even if it comes late and sets out a very long timetable for awarding the money,” says Eivind Hoff from Bellona Europa.

A tough fight by Bellona and its allies to introduce an EU funding mechanism for CCS as part of the EU climate and energy package in 2008 resulted in this so-called NER300 funding mechanism. After the adoption of this ’set-aside’ for CCS by the European Parliament and the Council, a Commission Decision was adopted in February 2010 that set out the details on how projects would be selected. On November 9th, the first call for proposals to allocate funds from the sale of 200mn of the 300mn EUAs was then finally published. The next call is expected in one or two years.

Projects have now three months to submit proposals to their respective Member States. The latter have then three more months to decide which projects they want to support, and by how much they want to co-fund them. The NER300 awards will cover 50% of the net costs of doing CCS (that is gross CCS capital and operating expenditure minus the benefits of not having to surrender EUAs for stored CO2).

The European Investment Bank will then conduct a technical and financial due diligence of the candidate projects submitted by Member States in order to rank them according to how effectively they contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions per euro of public funding (both NER300, other EU funding and Member State support). Depending on the number of candidates, this could take another nine months. Finally, the Commission will do a number of verifications and consult with Member States before final awards are expected in the second half of 2012.

”This is too late. It takes a long time to build these complex projects. If this timetable remains, project will not be able to start operating by the end of 2015 – which was the objective set out for the NER300 by EU leaders in 2008,” says Hoff.

Find out the call for proposals here.