Abstract
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) might be a central technology to reach the decarbonisation goals of the European energy system. However, CCS deployment faces multiple economic, technological, and infrastructure challenges. Related literature tends to only focus on certain aspects of the CCS technology or to be limited to a particular sector perspective. In contrast, this paper presents a holistic modelling framework to analyse the long-term perspectives of CCS in Europe by extending the typical analysis from the electricity sector to the industry sector, and by including the CO2 infrastructure level with CO2 pipelines and storage. To this end, we use state-of-the-art models of the electricity sector (generation investment and electricity grid models), the industry sector, as well as the CO2 infrastructure sector. This unique modelling framework analyses the feasibility and costs of CCS deployment in the European Union towards 2050 in three scenarios with the same ambitious climate policy target (~85% CO2 emissions reduction). The main insights on the deployment of CCS in Europe hinges on two factors: i) the development of low-cost power generation technologies with carbon capture (coal and/or gas-fired), and ii) a sufficiently high CO2 price to compensate for the costs of deploying the CO2 transport infrastructure. Once CO2 transport infrastructure is available, CCS will be a preferred mitigation option for the industry sector emissions. The joint use of CO2 infrastructure by the electricity and the industry sector allows for economies of scale and economies of density. In the long term, CCS cannot achieve the 100% decarbonisation target of the energy sector because the technology can only capture 80–90% of the CO2 emissions of thermal power plants. Moreover, the advantages of CCS in terms of energy system costs compared to a system without CCS is rather small, in the range of 2%. It crucially depends on the costs of renewables and the costs of their integration in the electricity grid.
Highlights
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a debatable technology that is not supported as a solution for mitigating climate change by the different stakeholders in the European Union (EU)
The level of CCS employment has a significant impact on the installed capacity of renewables and the amount of curtailed generation, which are significantly higher in the No CCS Scenario compared to the Affordable CCS Scenario
When comparing to the Costly CCS Scenario, our results indicate that the employment of CCS in the electricity sector mostly depends on the availability of advanced CCS
Summary
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a debatable technology that is not supported as a solution for mitigating climate change by the different stakeholders in the European Union (EU). In the early 2000s, the situation in Europe was different, when CCS was largely uncontested and widely supported as future mitigation op tion (Odenberger et al, 2008). Europe was on the forefront of CCS development with more than 30 announced demonstration projects in the power and industry sector. There are only two operating CCS projects in Europe, namely in the offshore natural gas fields Sleipner (which started already in the 1990s) and Snøvhit (since the mid-2000s), Norway, where CO2 is Energy Economics 104 (2021) 105631 captured at the gas processing units and reinjected in the gas fields. The complete abandon of CCS in the EU is somewhat surprising given how optimistic and supportive the political environment for CCS was only a little more than 10 years ago
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