☁ Multi-national agreement in Europe to scale CO2 transport and storage infrastructure ☁

🇪🇺 Safe and reliable CO2 transport infrastructure is central to our ability to scale carbon dioxide removal (hashtag#CDR). In Europe alone, we will need to remove at least 400Mt of CO2 every year by 2050.

🤝 Five Northern European countries — Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden — struck an agreement for the international transport and storage of CO2 across borders ⚡️

🚚 This milestone marks a crucial step towards establishing a robust European infrastructure for the transport and storage of CO2.

📜 Since 2021, there have been various bilateral agreements around the North Sea on energy cooperation, including carbon management, between Norway and other countries like the Netherlands, Belgium, and Denmark.

🔎 These most recent arrangements, concluded during the EU’s informal meeting of Energy ministers in Brussels, represent a major stride towards developing a comprehensive cross-border CO2 transport and geological storage infrastructure in Europe.

🇳🇴 🇨🇭 This development could already be accelerating cross-border cooperation, as on May 14th, Norway and Switzerland signed a Declaration of Intent to strengthen cooperation on CCS and carbon dioxide removals between the two countries - see comments.

🌍 On the legislative front, the Net Zero Industry Act (hashtag#NZIA) presents a chance to develop this technology across Europe. The NZIA sets the EU’s goal of establishing 50 million tons of CO2 storage by 2030 and has added CCS to the list of net-zero technologies being prioritised.

💭 It is crucial that all European countries ramp up efforts and start investing in transport and storage infrastructure. If not, there is a risk that European CO2 storage will become monopolised by North Sea countries, limiting the decarbonization potential of Central, Southern and Eastern Europe by becoming prohibitively expensive. This was outlined nicely in a recent article by Eadbhard Pernot (formerly CATF), Martin Birk Rasmussen (CONCITO), and Lina Strandvåg Nagell (Bellona) - see comments.

😮 The scale-up of safe and durable geological carbon storage is crucial to our net zero goals - the onshore storage potential in France alone is estimated at around 1100 MtCO2!

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