Carbon Capture17 Oct 2020 18:01
“Reaching net zero will be virtually impossible without CCUS,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in a recent report on the role of carbon capture, utilization, and storage in the energy transition. Many governments, especially in mature economies, as well as all oil and gas supermajors, also seem to concur that carbon capture and storage is a critical part of achieving the emission reduction targets and net-zero goals that various countries and businesses, including the European oil majors, are pursuing.
Governments and oil firms are betting big on CCUS, but a large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage projects is still years away.
Technology and costs continue to be significant hurdles on the road to making CCUS a vast and truly global industry capable of abating emissions not only from new energy generation, such as the production of blue hydrogen, but also from existing energy systems and from heavy industries such as cement, steel, or chemicals production.
Governments and industry need to invest hundreds of billions of U.S. dollars over the next two to three decades if CCUS stands a chance of becoming the pillar of the energy transition and “the only group of technologies that contributes both to reducing emissions in key sectors directly and to removing CO2 to balance emissions that are challenging to avoid,” as the IEA describes it in its report.
The Potential Is There
Various studies and pilot projects have shown that CCUS has the potential to become the industry that will help heavy industry and fossil fuel industries to cut emissions.
Globally, there are more than 60 operational CCS projects of varying capture capacity, with the United States leading with 28 percent of those operational projects, followed at quite a distance by China, Canada, Japan, and Australia, Wood Mackenzie said in a report on the North Sea potential to net-zero last month.
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Most recently, Norway has just launched the Longship project, which includes funding for the Northern Lights joint project of supermajors Equinor, Shell, and Total to capture CO2 from industrial sources in the Oslo fjord region (cement and waste-to-energy) and shipping of liquid CO2 from these industrial capture sites to an onshore terminal on the Norwegian west coast. The government funding is US$1.8 billion (16.8 billion Norwegian crowns) out of the total US$2.7 billion (25.1 billion crowns) project costs.
“For Longship to be a successful climate project for the future, other countries also have to start using this technology,” Norway’s Prime Minister Erna Solberg said.
Government Support Is Critical
The Norwegian project goes to show what analysts have been saying about CCUS all along: government support and sponsorship is critical for getting this industry off the ground, and large-scale deployment is essential to achieving meaningful emissions reductions on a global scale.
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