Carbon capture utilisation and storage : technology development report

In December 2015 at the Climate conference (COP 21) in Paris, policy makers agreed on the ambition to keep the temperature bellow 2 0C aiming for 1.5 0C. According to the IEA, to reach the 2 0C scenario target, it will be necessary to store around 94 Giga tonnes of (cumulative) or 6 Giga tonnes (Gt) per year of CO2 by 2050. So far, nearly 260 million tonnes (Mt) of CO2 emissions have been captured and stored globally. The Special Report on Global warming of 1.5°C (IPCC SR15) reinforced the important role of CCS in avoiding dangerous climate change. More recently, the 1.5°C compliant scenarios in the European Commission's strategic long-term vision depend on CCS and CO2 removal techniques to achieve climate neutrality. In Europe, carbon capture and storage gained more political attention from 2005. The first CCS communication from the EU dates in 2006 [5]. In 2007, CCS was included in the European agenda as an important tool to keep climate change in control. In 2009, the first EU CCS directive was published and then several funding mechanisms for R&D, demonstration projects have been created via framework programmes and other EU funding schemes. CCUS has been acknowledged in the context of the European Energy Union as a fundamental research and development priority to achieve 2050 climate objectives in a cost-effective way. Most recently, the new European Green Deal included carbon capture, storage and utilisation in the technologies necessary toward a transition to climate neutrality. CCUS is relevant to a number of areas including energy generation, industry, transport sector, and waste disposal. CO2 utilisation has attracted interest due to a potential for the replacement of non-sustainable fossil fuels by recycled CO2 that could both prevent the use of fossil fuel and avoid net CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. CO2 utilisation has also emerged as a source of potential competitive advantage for the European industry in the production of fuels, chemicals and materials. A variety of CO2 sources is available which can be classified as point CO2 sources and atmospheric CO2 sources. The predicted short-term market potential by for CO2 utilisation processes is around 200 MtCO2/y (300 in the best case), compared to about 14 000 MtCO2/y emitted from large point sources [10]. Thus, mapping the best points of CO2 emission and matching with utilisation opportunities will be significantly important to justify the potential of CO2 utilisation potential. Finally, potential uses of CO2 would need to satisfy certain criteria such as emission reduction benefits, revenue to cover CO2 feedstock costs and meaningful scale to make sense as a climate change mitigation option.