News
Publish date: November 29, 2009
Written by: Veronica Webster
News
The report, written for the Ministry of Economic Affairs and the Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment, emphasises the need for CCS if emission reductions are to be in line with those recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Two scenarios describing optimistic and pessimistic emission reductions from now until 2050 (“green” and “baseline” scenarios) in the Netherlands are offered. Both necessitate a large-scale CCS rollout in the medium-term.
“Although the G8 has committed to 80 percent CO2 reductions in 2050 compared to 1990, it is yet unclear how that will be achieved. Our scenarios suggest that CCS on all fossil fuel power generation emissions is required by 2050,”reads the report (download in PDF format to the right).
The report emphasises the lack of certainty surrounding CCS and calls for regulatory certainty to achieve commercial deployment of CCS soon after 2020.
“Currently, the emissions-trading scheme (ETS) CO2 price is insufficient to stimulate CCS investments. […] However, minimizing regulatory uncertainty and providing a stable and predictable regulatory environment will facilitate CCS investments. This will enable companies to make efficient long-term investment decisions.”
“On top of ETS, both structural measures (price floor, norms, mandates) and temporary measures (tax breaks, feed in tariffs, subsidies) could be applied,” says the report.
“A limit to the amount of CO2 emitted per kilowatt-hour electricity – an emissions performance standard – would provide industry with regulatory certainty that is currently lacking and which acts as a disincentive for wide-scale investment in CCS. As is made clear in the MCKinsey report, a CCS rollout in the Netherlands – and globally – is essential to drastically reduce CO2 emissions and combat climate change”, says Eivind Hoff, director of Bellona Europa.
Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.
After years of inaction, Germany is working on its Carbon Management Strategy to resolve how CCS can play a role in climate action in industry. At the end of February, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action published first key points and a proposal to amend the law Kohlenstoffdioxid Speicherungsgesetz (KSpG). Bellona Deutschland, who was actively involved in the previous stakeholder dialogue submitted a statement in the association hearing.
In the midst of a global discussion on whether natural gas should be used as a transitional fuel and whether emissions from its extraction, production, transport and use are significantly less than those from other fossil fuels, Russia has developed ambitious plans to increase its own production of liquified natural gas (LNG) in the Arctic – a region with 75% of proven gas reserves in Russia – to raise its share in the international gas trade.
In this news digest, we monitor events that impact the environment in the Russian Arctic. Our main focus lies in identifying the factors that contribute to pollution risks and climate change.