News
Publish date: May 11, 2011
Written by: Niklas Kalvø Tessem
News
The EIB has committed itself to support the project with €550 million, and the EBRD with €100 million. However, a critical report by the Slovenian Ministry of Economy seriously questions the economic viability of the project. As a consequence, the government will not issue state guarantee for the €440 million first tranche of the EIB loan.
– The decision by the Slovenian government is welcome, as the project has no serious plans for carbon dioxide capture and storage, and is heavily polluting, says Eivind Hoff, director of Bellona Europa. An assessment of the project’s CCS-readiness completed in 2010 was strongly criticized for being superficial.
European funding?
The Slovenian Ministry of Economy identified issued so serious that results in the report were handed to the Commission for the Prevention of Corruption, the General Police Directorate and the public prosecutor. Among these issues are superficial calculations of the economic viability of the project and failure to respect public procurement rules, making them susceptible to corruption. A slight increase in the price of emission allowances, compared to the project’s estimates, would make it uneconomic.
NGOs now call for the European institutions to withdraw support for the project.
– The EIB and the EBRD should need no additional reasons to withdraw all European public money from this project right now, comments Piotr Trzaskowski, form the NGO Bankwatch climate and energy coordinator, in a press release.
Environmentally harmful
Trzaskowski notes that in addition to be very finically risky, the project is highly unsustainable.
– We have known from the beginning that the new block at Sostanj is a bad investment in terms of the sustainability of the Slovenian energy sector, as it would make it impossible for the country to meet its climate targets over the next decades, says Trzaskowski.
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.