5 December 2023

OPEN LETTER ON NET-ZERO INDUSTRY ACT

Dear Minister,

Members of Carbon Capture and Storage Europe encourage Ministers to support the Presidency text on CO2 injection capacity (articles 16-18). Without very extensive CCS deployment it will not be possible to achieve the Union's net-zero ambition. The technology is needed to curb emissions from hard-to-abate industrial sectors and to remove CO2 already in the atmosphere.

The scale of the requirement has scarcely been appreciated. Denmark's Kalundborg Hub, the EU's first full-chain CCS project to gain a Final Investment Decision, will capture 430,000 tonnes of CO2 per annum. Yet estimates for the quantity that the Union must
capture and store annually by 2050 range from 300Mt to more than 600Mt. Widespread availability of CO2 storage sites across Europe must be the ambition.

We acknowledge that the Commission's proposed means of securing the first 50 million tonnes of annual CO2 storage capacity by 2030 has a bias in favour of areas where oil and gas extraction has taken place in years past. This reflects detailed geological knowledge and in some cases the potential for use of existing infrastructure.

Very little progress has been made since the CO2 Storage Directive became law in 2009. It is now essential to accelerate developments, gain experience and reduce costs for the benefit of all, and the proposal before you offers a means to secure these
outcomes. Attention should be paid to article 17(3) which requires Member States to report on their plans to decarbonise industrial sectors in the absence of national CO2 storage projects.

The Union's CCS frontrunners, Denmark and the Netherlands, have set targets and put in place financial support mechanisms, but many of the draft National Energy and Climate Plans so far published fail to address the need for CCS or indicate how industry will achieve emission reductions of the scale required. With this deficiency they are not credible.

We hope that the proposal in the Presidency text will encourage all governments to address this weakness in their climate policies, and we will be very happy to provide advice and assistance should this be requested.

Yours sincerely

Chris Davies
Director, CCS Europe
[email protected]