The hydrogen pipeline would serve big industrial facilities, including a refinery owned by oil major Shell and a Peugeot car manufacturing plant, which are big consumers of energy and produce CO2. “There is an opportunity for an industrial decarbonisation project, from beginning to end,” said Tony Smith, an advisor at Peel group, which helped design the project. The second project involves the construction of a new hydrogen pipeline between the Greater Manchester region and Liverpool that promoters say could usher in a new era of hydrogen-fueled vehicles while significantly decarbonising the region’s energy. “We truly need leadership,” he said, underlining that “no single euro has yet been made available for CCS,” despite the Dutch government pledges and the inclusion of the Port of Rotterdam’s CO2 hub in the European Commission’s latest list of Projects of Common Interest eligible for EU funding. Still, Driessen believes the plan is attractive and could even become a flagship project at the European level because it allows decarbonising industries like petrochemicals, for which there is no obvious low-carbon energy alternative. “Let’s be clear, it’s – for a large part – their problem.” “If the government doesn’t come up with budgeting, financing or the right rules, then there is no use for us to do anything,” Driessen said. (The price has since climbed up to just over €14 per tonne). But at the time Driessen spoke, the tonne of CO2 was hovering at around €8 per tonne on the EU carbon market, meaning government intervention is necessary to make the project worthwhile. The project could be viable with a carbon price of €30 a tonne, EURACTIV understands. “We’re not CCS fanatics, we’re decarbonisation fanatics,” Driessen said, explaining that the Port of Rotterdam was ideally located at the heart of Europe’s industrial North to develop such a network.Įnvironmentalists find renewed hope in ‘industrial’ CCSĬonsidered almost dead and buried a few years ago, carbon capture and storage (CCS) is enjoying renewed support among environmentalists, providing fresh hopes that the much decried technology may finally be coming of age and play its part in the fight against climate change. If successful, the pipeline network could be extended to serve industrial plants in nearby Belgium, Germany and the UK. ![]() The CO2 collected from highly-polluting plants there would be transported via a pipeline network for injection in depleted oil and gas fields in the North Sea. The port’s plan, which could be launched as early as 2020, is to create a CO2 transport hub that will initially be able to serve industrial installations located in the Netherlands. “We have 20% of the CO2 emissions of our whole country concentrated in our port,” Driessen explained, saying the port’s plan fits into a broader Dutch government strategy to reduce CO2 emission by 49% by 2030 – of which 20 megatonnes are expected to come from CCS. ![]() And all of the scenarios it came up with had CCS at their core, he told participants at the roundtable discussion, organised by Fleishman Hillard, a consultancy. Mark Driessen, from the Port of Rotterdam Authority, said the port explored different pathways to reduce its emissions, which are generated mainly from oil refining, petrochemicals and electricity production. “These two projects are simply the most exciting in Europe,” said Chris Davies, a former British Member of the European Parliament who has led previous attempts to support CCS at EU level.ĭavies was introducing a roundtable discussion earlier this year over gas pipeline networks around the Port of Rotterdam and in the Greater Manchester region that some see as a potential blueprint for new CCS projects in Europe and across the world. Even the use of CCS to decarbonise heavy industries like steelmaking now looks less attractive. “The game is over” for carbon capture and storage, priced out of the low-carbon energy mix by the rise of cheap renewables, industry experts say. ‘Game over’ for CCS, driven out by cheap renewables
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