Some $35 billion in investment on large-scale CCS developments could be spent by 2035 – with as much as 75 million tonnes of CO 2 captured per year – according to research by Rystad Energy.
Some $35 billion in investment on large-scale CCS developments could be spent by 2035 – with as much as 75 million tonnes of CO2 captured per year – according to research by Rystad Energy.
In Europe alone there are around 10 larger projects, with both carbon capture and storage, that are planned and have a high chance of being operational by 2035. Most of them are located around the North Sea in Norway, the UK, Denmark and the Netherlands, but there are also projects on the drawing board in Ireland and Italy.
Although most of the projects are expected to be online from the middle of this decade, investments and contracts awarded to suppliers will already start to grow significantly from 2021 to 2023, as most projects have a development timeline of three to five years. Total capital investment for these projects is expected to reach $30 billion, in addition to operational expenditure totalling $5 billion until 2035.
The first three projects that are due to become operational are Acorn CCS, Northern Lights and Porthos, which will be game-changing as they will de-risk the overall CCS uncertainty, said Rystad. More than twice as many projects, in count and size, are likely to follow.
With the projects so far planned in Europe, Rystad expects 3 million tonnes per annum (tpa) of CO2 capture and storage capacity will be added each year from 2021 to 2025, then jumping to 7 million tpa in 2026–2030. By 2035 a total installed capacity of around 75 million tpa, with almost 80% coming from UK projects, is predicted..
Currently, there are only two complete full-scale CO2 projects operational in Europe: The CO2 injection projects at Norway’s offshore fields Sleipner and Snohvit, with a combined CO2 capture and storage capacity of around 1.5 million tpa.
Europe has about 1000 larger industrial sites, such as cement plants, steel producers, fossil power and waste-to-energy plants, that could all be candidates for capturing CO2. About 250 of these are within reasonable shipping distance for sending CO2 to be stored in the North Sea. Worldwide, there could be around 6000 industrial plants suitable for CO2 capture.
‘Several European policymakers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have previously indicated they are ready to rule out CCS as a climate mitigation tool, saying the technology is not proven and available and has unrealistic expectations. For CCS to have a significant future, it’s therefore important that Northern Lights and Acorn run through their pilot stages to show that this can be a proven technology,’ said Rystad Energy’s head of energy service research Audun Martinsen. ‘As standard renewable technologies that have some maturity in Europe such as solar installations and offshore wind farms are increasingly gaining market share, CCS projects will face competition and have to prove cost-worthy,’ said Martinsen.
