As it stands, the European Commission’s “CCS deployment roadmap” (See PDF to right) proposes commercial viability of CCS to occur between 2020 and 2025. At the conference on Wednesday, ZEP called for the deadline to be no later than 2020 to avoid global temperature levels to rise more than the 2°C as recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In parallel, the issue of how permits for CCS demonstration plants would be administered was raised given that these projects need to start being built before the deadline for transposition of the **CO2 Geological Storage Directive comes into force as national law by June 2011. Commission officials said that this question would be considered by a panel of expert lawyers in due course.
“It is imperative that any new coal plants being built from now on are fully equipped with CCS technology by 2020,” says Eivind Hoff of Bellona Europa.