IEAGHG has just completed its second joint workshop with IETS another member of the IEA’s Energy Technology Network. The first meeting was held last year in Japan and focused on the steel industry. This meeting was broader in that it covered the cement, oil refining, industrial hydrogen production and pulp and paper industries. The back drop for this meeting was sunny Lisbon, Portugal.

The meeting covered a lot of ground and for me it was clear how much activity there is going on with CCS implementation in industry globally. In reality there are many more industrial CCS projects than ones in the power sector but projects like Boundary Dam capture the headlines, sorry for the pun.

Industry in Europe is of course concerned about its competitiveness in a global market if it has to include the costs of CCS. However if the EU is going to meet its recently announced emission reduction targets then industrial CCS is going to play a big role. In my view it looks like industry, in some parts of the EU at least, is preparing itself for this inevitably.

It is clear that we need some way to incentivise CCS in industry in Europe, the ETS so far hasn’t delivered what the market perceives to be a good price for carbon. Equally by excluding biomass emissions the ETS excludes Bio-CCS as an option which is a policy disaster that needs to be addressed as soon as possible.

We also need to develop the infrastructure that ties the projects together. No one project can afford to stand the costs of a pipeline network, hopefully the new NER400 initiative may allow such up-front costs to be covered with EU support to allow projects to take advantage of reduced start-up costs.

As an aside, Portugal is not a member of IEAGHG but it is of IETS so for me it was a first to have a meeting like this in Lisbon. To me it was a win –win; good meeting, great place to visit and it was lovely and sunny to boot.