The appointment of Sara Aagesen as third vice president and minister for the Ecological Transition means giving continuity to the task of his predecessor, Teresa Riberaafter two decades of working together, but also policy changes that the already vice president of the European Commission has kept blocked and to which Aagesen, to whom a more “scientific-technical” profile is attributed, is shown more open. One of them are the technologies for CO2 captureincreasingly widespread in Europe but non-existent in Spain and for which the new minister promised a few months ago to draw up a roadmap.
In the same way that an alteration to the calendar of closure of nuclear plantsthe industry hopes that the Ministry will soon begin to develop a roadmap for order the capture, transfer and storage of CO2 emissions that are difficult to avoid -collapsible- by the industry. That is what Aagesen committed to in a meeting in early October with the PTECO2 technological platformwith which steel industries such as Arcelor Mittal, mining companies such as Magna, cement companies such as Cemex, chemicals such as Dow and energy companies Repsol and Naturgy are associated. They once again insisted on the need to develop this technology in Spain, for which they demand public aid but also a regulatory framework that encourage investment necessary to develop the technology or to search for the deep warehouse locations.
According to sources present at the meeting, the then Secretary of State for Energy was “absolutely” conscious that in Spain it must also be possible to capture CO2 emissions that are “difficult to reduce” and committed to developing a roadmap which will now be his entire responsibility, as the head of the Ministry and without the brakes that the sector attributes to Ribera all these years.
In addition to assurances that there will be a plan, Aagesen also asked them for somethingaccording to sources. What PTECO2 deploy “didactic” work among environmental organizations. That “work” with the so-called G-5, He told them, referring to the group of five environmental organizations that formally advise the Ministry –Greenpeace, Ecologists in Action, Friends of the Earth, SEO/BirdLife and WWW– who claim that it is a technology that is not mature enough and are suspicious of it, because in the end it means a ‘permission’ to continue broadcasting greenhouse gases instead of looking for alternatives away from fossil fuels.
PTECO2’s response was affirmative, although they have not yet contacted these organizations. Yes, they plan to do so shortly with the Secretary of State for the Environment, Hugo Moránin a meeting in which they will make information, training or any other type of help available to their technicians so that they can face a process that they consider especially complicated, process environmental impact statements of future CO2 capture, transport and storage projects.
One hundred days to start working
Once Aagesen is confirmed as vice president and minister and in accordance with the guarantees she gave them in the fall, the PTECO2 platform gives her a grace period of “one hundred days”not so much so that the roadmap is ready, but so that at least the Ecological Transition begins to work on it. In this way, they hope that a technology that European Commission takes into account as one of the ways for the EU to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2040, as a prior step to carbon neutrality in 2050. To do this, it calculates that Member States should be able to capture 50 million tons of “difficult abatement” emissions in 2030, 280 in 2040 and 450 in 2050. In Spain, PTECO2 calculates that Capture technologies are the only alternative to eliminate from the order of 40 million tons of CO2 emissions of difficult despondency that the industry released into the atmosphere in 2022, two-thirds of the total. However, at the moment the National Integrated Energy and Climate Plan (PNIEC) only aims to develop “a viability plan” for a technology that adds that “it must be produced as a last resort” and “should not discourage the abandonment of fossil fuels.”
The sector is confident that it will now be possible to finalize the development of a plan that it hopes will be a commitment that The Government will support the investment in the capture of CO2 and projects to transport it -for pipelines, by ship or in tanker trucksdepending on the distance – and to boost the geological storage where it would end up being injected. The PTECO2 platform calculates that in Spain there should be “four or five” locationswhich still needs to be located among the more than a hundred sites that the Geological Mining Institute of Spain has identified (IGME) with the potential for part of the CO2 emitted by the industry to be injected into porous rocks at more than 800 meters deep. Meanwhile, he regrets that Ribera’s opposition to these technologies has been delaying the concession to these technologies for months. Repsol of a permit to research in this area with funds granted for this from the program that was granted for one year to be able to spend aid granted by the European Commission of his Innovation Fund.
Anomaly in the EU
Spain is one of the few EU countries where there are no projects in operation or under study to carry out a technology that leads USA and of which there are 40 operational projects around the world and 400 in development.
In Europe there are already two operational facilitiesin the North Sea and on the border between Serbia and Hungary, others 17 projects are in “advanced status” and another four, under construction, in Belgium and Norway. In line with what PTECO2 now expects from the Government, 20 of the 27 EU countries have already approved national strategies and investment plans to develop capture, transport and storage technology and offer aid and incentives.
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