{"id":132357,"date":"2023-09-27T07:10:00","date_gmt":"2023-09-27T05:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/?p=132357"},"modified":"2023-09-25T08:58:35","modified_gmt":"2023-09-25T06:58:35","slug":"industrial-carbon-capture-only-for-truly-unavoidable-emissions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/industrial-carbon-capture-only-for-truly-unavoidable-emissions\/","title":{"rendered":"Industrial carbon capture: Only for truly \u2018unavoidable emissions\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

Wopke Hoekstra, the Dutch nominee to replace Frans Timmermans as EU climate commissioner, is due to take over key remaining parts of his predecessor\u2019s portfolio.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Instead of applying CCS, emissions in sectors like cement can be avoided by reducing the clinker content of cement. But this is not what EU funds are focusing on, write Leon de Graaf, Dominika Flori\u00e1nov\u00e1, Antoine Grall and Ella Oksala. \u00a9<\/strong> [astrid westvang \/ Flickr<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

These include steering the EU\u2019s position during international climate negotiations at COP28, overseeing the EU\u2019s 2040 emission reduction target, and the so-called Industrial Carbon Management Strategy that includes a carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) roadmap for heavy industries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) features as one of the eight technologies on the shortlist of the European Commission\u2019s proposal on the Net-Zero Industry Act (NZIA), which is the EU\u2019s effort to participate in the global race for attracting investments in net-zero technologies against the US Inflation Reduction Act and Chinese subsidies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The issue is that CCS features in the Commission\u2019s NZIA proposal without clearly specifying what it should target. This creates a risk that CCS might be used for too many purposes. This wouldn\u2019t make sense because industrial CCS is a relatively expensive technology that has not yet been proven at scale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this reason, the March 2023 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)<\/a>shows that CCUS will hardly impact reducing global industrial GHG emissions before 2030 and only at very high global carbon prices of US$100-200 per ton.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That is why\u00a0the adoption of the European Parliament\u2019s ENVI Committee\u2019s opinion<\/a>\u00a0on the NZIA earlier this week is an important step in the right direction, calling to prioritise\u00a0the storage\u00a0of\u00a0\u201cunavoidable\u00a0industrial process emissions remaining after the best available techniques and all demand-side emissions reduction measures have been demonstrably applied\u201d\u00a0at CO2 storage sites.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u00a9<\/strong> IPCC, 2023<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Defining \u201cunavoidable\u201d emissions<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

But what \u201cunavoidable\u201d exactly means is still subject to heated debate. This debate is crucial because what is today seen as unavoidable can very rapidly become avoidable with focused effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For example, until around 2016, the steel sector was somewhat convinced that it would need CCS to produce its steel, given the unavoidable emissions from the blast furnace process. Then came the HYBRIT project<\/a> in Sweden, which uses a direct-reduction iron (DRI) process made with fossil-free electricity and hydrogen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As of today, virtually all global primary steelmakers<\/a> have announced they will do the same, thereby short-circuiting the emissions associated with blast furnace steel. The result? Previously thought unavoidable steel production emissions are now avoidable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Similarly, if power was produced simply by burning coal, the power sector could be classified as having unavoidable emissions. However, rather than merely using CCS, innovation has led to a rapid increase in renewables. Just because coal-based power production has unavoidable emissions, it does not mean that all power production needs to have inevitable emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the two examples above, by focusing on the end products (steel and power), we have backed technologies that minimise and will ultimately phase out the elements of those end products that contain the \u201cunavoidable\u201d CO2<\/sub> emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because of these, CCS is less of a priority for steel and power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By applying this same logic, CO2<\/sub> emissions can be avoided in other sectors, such as cement, a sector responsible for 8% of global GHG emissions. Clinker, the primary ingredient in conventional cement, is responsible for 94% of cement\u2019s carbon footprint, and it is certainly true that the CO2<\/sub> from clinker production is unavoidable. However, the CO2<\/sub> produced by cement is absolutely avoidable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Simply put, if one uses less clinker in cement, there will be an almost\u00a01-to-1\u00a0reduction in CO2<\/sub> produced from that cement.\u00a0A growing number of cement cleantech companies<\/a>\u00a0are working towards providing scalable, high-quality cement with a much lower clinker content, which, like the examples above, would result in an end product with far fewer emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As with the steel, power and other sectors, it is essential to disconnect component parts with unavoidable emissions from the ultimate end product, which may be decarbonised using alternative products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this is not what EU funds are focusing on. In fact, out of the 10 large-scale cement projects that have received funding under the EU Emissions Trading System\u2019s (EU ETS) Innovation Fund, each project has been for CCUS, and none have focused on clinker reduction. Therefore, it would be essential to hear from Mr Hoekstra if he plans to use the upcoming CCUS roadmap to specify that industrial CCS should focus on reducing truly unavoidable emissions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is this a plea to stop funding and research for industrial CCS? Certainly not. This is a plea not to let \u201cunavoidable emissions\u201d become the carte blanche of hard-to-abate sectors to access funding.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There needs to be some balance between the EU funding that\u2019s going towards CCS and money that\u2019s going into technologies that avoid the production of carbon in the first instance. Currently, the balance in emission-intensive sectors such as cement is simply off.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wopke Hoekstra, the Dutch nominee to replace Frans Timmermans as EU climate commissioner, is due to take over key remaining parts of his predecessor\u2019s portfolio. These include steering the EU\u2019s position during international climate negotiations at COP28, overseeing the EU\u2019s 2040 emission reduction target, and the so-called Industrial Carbon Management Strategy that includes a carbon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","nova_meta_subtitle":"Upcoming EU legislation should limit industrial carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to truly unavoidable emissions, write Leon de Graaf, Dominika Flori\u00e1nov\u00e1, Antoine Grall and Ella Oksala","footnotes":""},"categories":[5571],"tags":[10744,21452,21439,12296,15949],"supplier":[4514,3345],"class_list":["post-132357","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-co2-based","tag-carboncapture","tag-carbonstorage","tag-carbonutilisation","tag-ccs","tag-ccus","supplier-european-parliament","supplier-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-ipcc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132357","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132357"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132357\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132357"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=132357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}