A Carbon Capture Serenade
“We need to hyper-cooperate”, “we need to act now”, “we need to scale up and do it faster”, and “we need more funding”. These are some of the statements I have heard so many times over the past few weeks, and probably also used myself, in the energy transition context when talking about carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The decarbonization of industries is critical and we cannot wait. We have the largest European amount of biogenic carbon emissions in the Nordics and should be a good source for technology-based carbon credits, ensuring strong traceability, bankability, and credibility.
Much of the Nordic CCS community gathered for two days in Stockholm this week, to discuss, share, and learn on a variety of some key contemporary topics around the whole CCUS value chain**.
Some of the key topics and challenges I registered (also on the basis of what the discussions were the previous week in Bremen, Germany), are that there needs to be stronger incentives from the governments on funding, and additional revenue streams are required, such as carbon credits. However, the certification needs to be clear and standardized in the voluntary market. Very, very few companies have to this day committed to the BECCS, the bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. More companies need to support this — we probably have to partner up and build the proper models for this, as this is a gap in the market.
Storage capacity needs to be scaled up(ongoing projects) and the transportation solutions (carbon from site to storage) will profit from emitters cooperating in clusters, to have a large volume to transport and to be able to share the development costs.
Additionally, government agencies need to support the developments from concept to operations, as well as having the penalties looming for those who do not make the transition in time.
So what about cooperation? The need is gigantic (I believe I heard one speaker mention that we do carbon capture and storage for 0.1% of the annual carbon emissions at present…), so to scale up and accelerate the implementation, we need to work together in the value chain and together with the policymakers. Can we do this? YES, I am convinced we are capable of moving faster.
Even though we still have a lot of hurdles, and progress taking a lot of time, I think that we are moving ahead. The gathered Nordic CCS community expressed willingness and optimism, but we need to have persistence, stamina, and a strong will to make this happen.
Moreover, this week’s podcast episode is suitably on the topic of carbon capture, you can find it here:
/Mika
*Adolphson & Falk, two Swedish synth-pioneers, made the fantastic (and still modern!) Stockholmsserenad in the early 80s
** KLIMPO’s annual BioCCUS conference
DISCLAIMER: All opinions expressed within the content are solely the author’s. All the views and opinions are the author’s own and should not be linked to the company.
