Norwegian ambassador Inga Magistad stressed in her opening statement that 30% of the €58mn pledged for Portugal under the 2009-2014 EEA Grants were to be spent on environmental matters and that CCS-related projects could be eligible.

Portugal, being rather poor in hydrocarbon reserves, has a geology which is not as well mapped as in many other European countries. Several projects are starting to fill this void, notably the COMET project funded by the EU and led by Dulce Boavida from LNEG. It will provide scenarios for matching CO₂ sources and sinks in Portugal, Spain and Morocco with transport infrastructure between now and 2050.

’This could be the basis of a gold-standard CCS roadmap for these countries, but it’s important to also address the regulatory developments that are required to make CCS become a reality in these countries,’ said Eivind Hoff who presented Bellona’s Greek CCS roadmap at the workshop. He believes that Portugal’s rapid pace of phasing out coal for power generation provides an opportunity to go immediately to the environmentally most beneficial forms of CCS: In industrial processes such as cement and refineries, as well as in combination with biomass to provide carbon negative solutions.

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