As Europe’s largest industrial nation, Germany stands at a crossroads. The current energy crisis has laid bare a fundamental strategic weakness in German policymaking over the past years. Opportunities to let technology openness drive innovation and bring different options for decarbonisation to the market have been missed. Paired with sluggish renewables expansion and outdated infrastructure, the challenge of decarbonising Germany’s vital industrial sector has grown in times when costs are rising and climate pressures are mounting. At the same time, European industrial decarbonisation – to a degree – hinges on the Industrienation, whose industrial production is as valuable as that of Europe’s next two largest industrial nations, France and Italy, combined.

With Bellona’s long-standing work on industrial decarbonisation, our new office in Berlin has made it its primary objective to support, guide and enable Germany’s industrial transformation.

Part of this work revolves around CCS as a key technology to ensure a future for the German industrial base. By providing Germany with a tool that is deployable without needing massive renewable resource that is scarce on the German territory, CCS represents an option to complement other existing decarbonisation pathways. However, an enabling regulatory framework must be provided for CCS to be deployed at scale.

In this policy briefing, we present the strategic case for CCS in Germany and outline the work of Bellona Deutschland on accelerating the emerging momentum on the back of the current crisis in order to move from project to implementation and transformation.