by Olivia Wynkoop and Maren Krämer
The BASF site in the port of Antwerp is where the carbon will be captured before it is shipped off and permanently stored under the earth in different parts of Europe. © BASF Antwerpen NV
One way for the European Union to reach climate neutrality by 2050? Capturing CO2 emissions from factories, turning them to liquid and storing them deep in the Earth. No, this isn’t from some sci-fi comic book: it’s Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology, and it’s being developed by the industry giants who know harmful pollutants best.
Four leading forces in steel, cement, biomass and chemical production recently received their share of €1.1 billion from the EU Commission’s Innovation Fund, a grant only awarded to seven out of 300 applicants developing low-carbon technology. “This is a smart investment into the decarbonisation and resilience of our economy; it boosts European industry’s position as global leaders in clean tech, creates local jobs, and helps to accelerate our green transition,” Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans said in a statement.
Kairos@C
Placed in Belgium’s Port of Antwerp sits Kairos@C, the project that received €360 million, or roughly one-third, of Innovation Fund money. It’s the first (and largest) cross-border carbon capture and storage value chain that will permanently store CO2 emissions from industrial factories located at the site. It has the potential to cut out 14 million tonnes of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere in its first ten years of operation, which will kickstart in 2025. The whole BASF site in Antwerp emits 3.8 million tons per year, and Kairos@C will reduce 25 percents of it.
Leading chemical producers BASF and Air Liquide are pairing their patented technology together for the project. Frederik Pieters, staff site manager at BASF Antwerp, said the project is a part of the port’s larger initiative to cut their emissions in half by 2030, labeled Antwerp@C.
“Which means that all other companies in the port, if they would be willing, could actually use this infrastructure. It would also be a scalable infrastructure so that it could be expanded to accommodate additional quantities from additional participants,” Pieters said.
Frederik Pieters, Staff site manager at BASF Antwerp NV © Maren Krämer
Here’s how it will work:
Find out more about the three main approaches for pulling the CO2 out of the gas mixture in this article in the Cosmos Magazine.
‘Decarbonize or perish’
There’s great talk on the rise and fall in emission allowances prices in the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS), but little on the ways industries can successfully decarbonise. According to the International Energy Agency, nearly half of the reduced emissions that Europe is aiming for by 2050 will have to come from technologies that have yet to expand full-scale. Emission-heavy companies need incentive to give these technologies a chance, said former European Commissioner for Energy Andris Piebalgs and Alessia Virone of the Clean Air Task Force in a joint column. Otherwise, companies will continue to overlook carbon prices and cash in on “free allowances.”
“Under current market conditions, the problem is that if [companies] choose to decarbonise, they are likely to perish due to increased costs. Policymakers must step in and ensure the availability of the required innovative technologies to decarbonise,” reads their article.
BASF’s Frederik Pieters pointed to the Paris Climate Agreement target to limit temperature increase to 1.5 degrees. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said reducing emissions is not enough to reach these goals – carbon removal strategies need to be invested alongside an overall emission reduction.
“If you look at industry, what are the other short term alternatives?” Pieters said. “There are none. So you have to go this route.” Pieters also added that not acting now could put a company in a “very disagreeable situation” that could detriment their competitive position, even to an existential degree. “That’s why all the big companies are actually working and preparing and doing things to have alternatives,” Pieters said.
The European Commission Charlemagne building in Brussels – one of the main decision-making settings © Maren Krämer
‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’
Supplying taxpayer’s money to historically harmful companies stir mixed reactions within the climate sector, however. As a note, BASF and a handful of other industrial companies are accountable for 44 percent of Belgium’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Watchdog groups like the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) have numerous reports on gas and oil lobby groups pressing for blue hydrogen and CCS technique investments in the EU. Greenpeace states that money spent on CCS only deters investments that could be used for green power sources.
“Letting CCS be used as a smokescreen for building new coal-fired power stations is unacceptable and irresponsible. ‘Capture ready’ coal plants pose a significant threat to the climate,” Greenpeace stated in a 2018 report, which spokesperson Paul Musiol confirmed is still the stance of the organization today.
But World Resources Institute research analyst Zachary Byrum and senior fellow Karl Hausker said having an all-or-nothing approach will only hinder progress. It’s more relevant to focus on the kinds of CO2 emissions that CCS strategies could be used for, they said. Process emissions, like the CO2 released during the chemical reactions to produce ethylene oxides in BASF for example, are inevitable. This is something you cannot “renewable your way out of,” Byrum said.
“You can’t just dismantle these institutions. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, essentially,” Byrum said. “If you can find a way to really utilize their existing capabilities and infrastructure and turn them into entities that can provide some public good, in addition to renewable power.”
Hausker added that the participation of companies that specialize in gas, oil and chemicals is not inherently a bad thing, since they have the infrastructure, the human capital and technical experience to do most of this work.
“The companies likely to deploy this are going to be companies that have been traditionally engaged in the production of energy or in or industrial products. So they are likely to be the ones investing in either the retrofit of facilities or the investment of new facilities,” Hausker said.
Serving safely and in time
The European Parliament appears to have wavering confidence in CCS techniques’ abilities to bring them closer to climate neutrality in a safe, timely and cost-efficient manner. One justification on the ETS amendments in Feburary seems to be in favor: “Even though some emissions of industry are hard to abate, these industries can use solutions like CCS to reach close to climate neutrality by 2045.” And in March, another justification stated that despite the considerable funding towards CCS, “there are still no existing cost-efficient projects on industrial scale that shows the viability of those technologies.”
Both the Parliament and the Council have to agree to the amendments. Members of Parliament recently agreed that EU funds should support the development of carbon capture and storage. © Maren Krämer
Regarding the safety of the methods, all kinds of stakeholders emphasize that CCS has been done for years and is only using techniques that were safely used for decades. Alfred Michael Sporman, Executive Director at Novo Nordisk Foundation C02 Research Center, confirms: “There are no data that carbon capture itself is unsafe.” But he adds: “CO2
storage, in particular of liquid CO2 in the subsurface, is a different issue though.” Frederik Pieters puts the possible risks in perspective to the benefits: “If this would be done on a gigantic scale, you can never exclude that maybe somewhere, someday, there might be an incident with a certain storage facility. But nevertheless, then it would be probably more an isolated incident. If you look at the potential for CCS, and also the needs to achieve the climate goals, we do still think it’s a very good way to go.”
On an international scale
Though agreeable in the EU sector, CCS could potentially pose a significant risk to international competitiveness, as not every part of the world follows the same guidelines. BASF is also evaluating CCS techniques for some plants in the U.S., but Pieters admitted that the CCS-projects in Europe are already diminishing their competitiveness on worldwide markets. “That’s an issue that is not being tackled by carbon border adjustment measures. The only real way for it is that you would have parallel measures, worldwide. That’s a very difficult seller with the US, China, Asia, but that’s the only thing that makes sense,” Pieters from BASF said.
Though there are geographic and economic barriers to developing countries having access to CCS technology in their production facilities, leading economies the EU and the U.S. may have a chance to pave the way to bring down costs and establish an ecofriendly governance paradigm for others to follow in suit. “Does that mean that they will, who knows? We can’t tell them to adopt the laws that we make, for better or for worse. But if we do it right and we show how the regulations create robust monitoring, reporting and verification plans for sequestered CO2, and how to
establish CO2 pipeline networks that don’t harm communities or don’t harm sensitive ecosystems, we can only hope that others will see the success of those and model it as well,” WRI analyst Byrum said.
To find out more about the decision-making process behind the Innovation Fund, read this article: https://eunews.mediajungle.dk/2022/05/05/eu-commissions-recent-e1-1-billion-carbon-innovation-investments-explained/