The European Commission has moved a step further towards forcing oil and gas firms to develop carbon capture and storage (CSS) to mitigate their contribution to climate change.
Petroleum producers operating in the EU have until 2030 to put in place – at their own expense – facilities capable of locking away 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
This is the storage side of CCS, a much-touted climate-fix technology that had all but dropped off the political radar by the late 2010s following a string of failed projects backed by EU funds.
But the target is fixed in the 2023 Net Zero Industry Act and, in effect, challenges the oil and gas industry to finally invest in a technology it has been trumpeting for decades as an oven-ready climate fix.
Now it has to put its money where its mouth is.
The European arm of the International Association of Oil and Gas Producers said last week that the EU was “on a clear path to meet and exceed” its target. But is it?
The trouble, as the lobby group CCS Europe readily acknowledges, is the aching gulf between the number of projects on the table and the handful that are actually being built.
In fact, the only operational carbon storage projects in Europe are in Norway – two demonstration projects linked to gas production and the Northern Lights project.
The latter, forever on the lips of CCS advocates, is heavily subsidised by the petroleum-rich Scandinavian kingdom. Norway only took the plunge after a failed diplomatic offensive to secure EU funding, although it has since scored a modest success.
Northern Lights took almost a decade to develop and has an annual capacity of just 1.5m tonnes. The consortium behind it – comprising Equinor (in which the Norwegian state is the largest shareholder), TotalEnergies and Shell – agreed a few weeks ago to invest in increasing capacity to 5m tonnes by 2028.
In this light, the 50 million-tonne target looks unattainable. And even if it were met, this represents barely 1.5% of total EU greenhouse gas emissions (3.2 billion tonnes in 2023).
Keep in mind this is only a storage target: Europe would still need to solve the complex and energy-intensive problem of how to capture, purify, compress, and transport 50 million tonnes of the potentially dangerous gas across land and sea to the new storage sites.
The few, rather more modest, EU projects that have moved beyond the drawing board only did so once taxpayer money – notably Dutch and Danish – was put on the table.
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