I dunno how you managed to keep your cool in this debate considering all the nonsense Erik kept throwing out about “resilience” despite you rubbishing it in the first 10 mins. Another stupid argument from hydrogen boosters. Endless soundbites and no facts, only children’s books, to support him.

This screams “tell them we’re looking at imports as we walk backwards binning the whole thing” though. I don’t for a second believe they’ll allocate any serious money for imports.

Remember how many people they have working on this stuff in the BMWE and elsewhere. They need an offramp.

More broadly, this apparent strategy shift to “funding imports instead of domestic production” seems incredibly stupid, coming from a country which more than any other should not be dependent on energy commodity imports.

Why on earth should German taxpayers be funding projects abroad?

The 300 Mtpa of storage (450 Mtpa if you follow the EU strategy) isn’t just hard it might not even be possible to do, especially because the focus atm is on the North Sea. This must change since these projects all have impacts on each other. A diverse set of sites across 🇪🇺 is key for costs & safety.

I agree with your sentiments but tbh the poignant Qs today are what we spend our clean power, biomass and money on. efuels and CCU are almost never good uses of those because there’s so much better use for those resources.

Your interview with Dan Jørgensen was great but clearly the EC still don’t get it. Or they do but need to find a way to walk it back without admitting they got drunk on hydrogen hopium.

I’m at least trying to make sure that does not happen with CCS and CDR.

Completely agree. If there’s one thing I wish the climate community would agree on it’s that we will not reach net zero at all costs. Net zero IAM’s might find a way include reduction and removal measures which cannot find a pathway to <€200/t but reality will not.

Biofuels are also riddled with fraud which is a really under-discussed topic in CDR world. The EU’s rulebook for CDR is turning out to be a total mess and once there’s compliance mechanisms set up with incentives, who knows what will be certified. I mean we see this with the VCM already.

Yeah I agree. I know a big fermentation plant in central Europe who spent years listening to RFNBO developers talking up efuels but couldn’t make a business case even with a free stream of pure bioCO2. They’re now doing bioCCS themselves and full chain costs are like €50-60/t.

Unless some form of obligation to procure CDR exists or it links with the ETS, there won’t be much scale but we should see the EU’s plan with the ETS revision starting next summer. Biomass supply is a key factor but ultimately it will go where most € are to be made, which is a Q of policy design.

I’m a lot more skeptical on CDR deployment but it pains me slightly that the policy framework emerging in Europe seems to benefit BioCCS projects over CCS projects that reduce emissions (e.g cement, ammonia etc) because they don’t receive additional revenues as they don’t sell credits.

Regarding onshore, it depends on national laws if it’s allowed. Denmark’s the first EU state to push ahead with it. This wouldn’t mean injecting onsite as you say, but it means transporting 50km instead of 500km offshore, for example. Cutting the transport distance is essential for lowest cost CCS.

I agree that learnings will come from injection but I should stress that this isn’t at all new and we’ve been doing this since 1972. If we want to inject 10 Gt cumulatively globally, that’s approx. the same amount as water which has been injected via O&G ops in history.

I was referring more to site characterisation there. The low hanging CO2 storage fruits will be picked first and then it becomes less easy. The operational dynamics also change as you have projects affecting each other. Pressure is a big issue here.

What is essential is doing the exploration work to unlock onshore resources which is where the real costs will come down vs offshore storage. Doing storage onshore can be several times cheaper but it comes at the cost of dealing with the built environment, although the footprint is minimal.

“Just” 300 Mtpa in Europe is an interesting framing as this is 6x more than globally today. The marginal cost curve for storage is likely to be like any other resource, the first Mts will be significantly less complicated than the latter as subsurface use has a major impact on future projects.

I would highly caution against any assumptions of “infinite” storage capacity anywhere on earth. Yes, there’s Gt’s of pore space but the limit is what you can inject per year because that’s what ultimately matters for the system to work.

lol they most certainly are not