by Matthew Hollingham, Ph.D. candidate at the Pennsylvania State University.
“Like the Winter Olympics, Norway and the Netherlands have a very strong performance”. This quote from Dr. Martin Borning, a partner at Greenberg Traurig, succinctly summarizes the Carbon Capture Europe Summit, following keynotes from the EU’s Directorate General for Energy, Ditte Juul Jørgensen, and Lars Erik Aamot, Director General of Energy at the Norwegian Ministry of Energy.
The summit was held at the World Trade Centre in Rotterdam, in a clean, modern, high-ceilinged, ground-level event space. Between talks, the attendees (who the event advertised as “85% director or above”) socialised at clean metal tables and at industry booths, fuelled by a surplus of machine-poured cappuccinos.
The stage was modern and well lit – fit for a TED Talk – with the speaker flanked by tasteful LED beams and the logos of various corporate sponsors. This stage was the event’s key attraction. Below is a summary of the key points discussed through the stage microphone and backroom chatter.
The question of risk
Project risk was the most significant topic of discussion, if not the key topic. This was primarily aimed at the uncertainty CCS faces (particularly regulatory and market uncertainty) in reaching an FID (final investment decision). Specifically, this was about sizing pipelines and solidifying demand signals, and matching sources and sinks when new capture CO2 streams are unknown 20-30 years in advance. This risk towards FID kept arising amongst a diverse set of companies, from Shell to Heidelberg Materials and Rystad Energy, to mention but a few, and numerous times on stage, the quip “a chicken and the egg problem” repeated itself.
This thematic saying was neatly summarized by the phrase “volume certainty” by Kelly Ripley, the general manager of commercial CCS at Shell. I had the opportunity to speak with her after her panel appearance.
“Let’s look at Aramis, for example, where the pipeline is oversized at 22 MTPA (million metric tonnes per annum), but we need to launch between 5-7.5 MTPA, so it’s having those customers under contract by then to enable us to take FID on the [CO2] stores.” She continued, “We just need the certainty of the state support to close those value gaps that exist, and we have a super good relationship with Aramis, where we have a joint task force where everyone is at the table and looking collectively at how to close the value paths”. CCS projects offloading risk to the state was another key point of discussion, and comes off the back of both Northern Lights and Porthos relying primarily on state backing.
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While the event was overrepresented by industry, some policymakers were present such as Lars Erik Aamot (mentioned above), reiterating that project risks were best mitigated by the state taking on a significant proportion of them, and spoke of trying to be “stable and predictable in our resource management policy.” However, even with state sponsorship, it was discussed that the UK government failed to meet its FID deadline due to the state’s own funding constraints for the Liverpool Bay project, showing it’s not an all-encompassing risk-reducing cure. This was also mentioned by Alberto Di Cecio, head of CCUS at ERMATECH Group, in a panel discussion, citing an “unnamed North American country” delivering the project a “12-month coffee break”.
These long-term FID risks also came to a head when discussing ‘Europe’s Cross-Boarder CO2 highways: Building the Transport Network between South Europe and North Europe’. Spurred by a mismatch between supply and demand across Europe, the north (specifically the North Sea) hosts significant CO2 sinks, while the south lacks sufficient capacity for its predicted output. A pipeline connecting the two had already been modelled by several companies throughout the convention, with Heidelberg Materials presenting a comprehensive internal model in its keynote on the first day. Recognising the importance of a CO2 pipeline connecting the mainland to the North Sea, the Port of Antwerp-Bruges spoke up, vying to become a European pass-through hub. This was of interest to countries even within Northern Europe, as some countries, such as Germany, had individuals report at the conference that subsurface injection was ‘functionally illegal’, so they were looking to Porthos and Northern Lights to pipe their CO2.
On this interconnected network of sources to sinks, there were also representatives from Ireland’s state energy company floating around the convention, scoping out their own country’s CCS potential in connecting to the North Sea as a CO2 sink. They stated that they ideally wanted to connect Dublin to a sink off the coast of Liverpool, but they were open to connecting to Northern Lights.
Geopolitics and public scrutiny
A separate point of discussion on risk was the uncertainty following the conflict in the Middle East, which has brought CCS down the priority list for oil and gas companies. One of the panellists even mentioned their friend, who heads an international shipping company, just had one of their tankers struck by a missile.
There was also the question of risk in dealing with NGOs and the public for project approvals. Kees van Seventer, founder and managing director of SeaSeaS spoke that “going sub-surface is the way to go”, with Laurance Boisramé, global director for hydrogen and CCUS at Bureau Veritas, stating it was “very important to get social acceptance, and so it is very important to get independent verification in claims about CO2 being removed”.
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This is particularly important in the growing age of ‘green washing’ accusations towards industry. Dorus Bakker, the CFO of Porthos, stated that “we went to local communities with a project engineer and showed how the technology works”. It is important to note, however, that the Porthos project suffered from a court case with a nitrogen NGO that caused almost 2 years of delays and millions in additional costs (I have a journal article currently in peer review with Environmental Science & Technology that should hopefully shed more light on this in the future).
However, the best answer to the question of risk in public approval, which drew some humorous laughs from the crowd, came from Tim Heijn, the managing director of Northern Lights. “We have had great support from the north of Bergen”, he said, “we had a visitor centre on site with 15,000 visitors per year!” He even spoke of increasing tourism to the local area.
Risk was on everyone’s minds, but clearly not in a way that stifled enthusiasm for project development. There was energy in the air around the CCS space, and despite ongoing conversations about the future of CCS in the US, it was clear that Europe had no intention of slowing down. Overall, discussion flowed, networking ensued, and pinch points were addressed in a crisp, effective event – an event whose conversations mirrored the venue’s tidy and functional Dutch aesthetic.
