EU urged to invest in carbon capture technology

The EU must invest in developing carbon capture and storage technology if it is to have any chance of meeting its climate change objectives, according to Polish MEP Jacek Saryusz-Wolski.

Speaking at a Brussels conference on Wednesday, the chair of parliament's foreign affairs committee said that a planned Carbon capture and storage (CCS) project for Poland's Lodz region was important in the context of energy security and in meeting the objectives of the climate and energy package.

CCS works by trapping CO2 emissions at source and burying them underground.

Saryusz-Wolski, who is an MEP for the Lodz region, said the debate over the planned Polish project on CCS at the Belchatów power plant demonstrated the importance of CCS in boosting energy security and protecting the environment.

"We are faced in the EU with a drastic situation of high dependency on energy," he said. "This dependency has to be limited through the diversification of resources and the diversification of means of transport.

"We can obviously in the long term change the situation by investing in renewables and nuclear - which is still a problem for some member states - but also by concentrating on using those resources which we do have."

To meet the 20-20-20 targets of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 on 1990 levels; increasing the share of renewables in the energy mix to 20 per cent and cutting energy consumption by 20 per cent, Saryusz-Wolski said the EU needed to find a way of exploiting existing energy sources.

He warned against the "severe geopolitical consequences" of increasing dependence on gas from the Middle East and Russia.

"If you want to solve the problem of energy security in the medium and long term, if you want to solve the problem of climate change, we have to find a way of exploiting our energy sources in a way which would not hamper our targets on climate change," he said. "And the answer is clean coal technology.

Speaking at the same event, Wlodzimierz Fisiak, the president of Lodz region, said the issue was particularly relevant coming ahead of Thursday's meeting of EU leaders in Brussels where energy and climate issues will be discussed.

"Coal produces a lot of emissions and this is extremely important in the context of our struggle with air pollution and climate change," he said.

Poland is home to the largest lignite-powered plant in Europe, something Fisiak described as "our real treasure" because of its capacity to boost investment and create jobs.

"New environmental technologies have a very positive impact, not only at a local and regional level, but also at a national and European level."

The European technology platform for zero emission fossil fuel power plants (Zep) is calling for up to 12 CCS demonstration plants to be in use by 2020.

Zep's Eric Drosin said the "implementation and deployment of demonstration plants for CCS are crucial" if the technology is to be viable by this time.

He spoke of Zep's "firm intent" for technology to play its part in tackling climate change. "If climate change continues unchecked it is going to have disastrous consequences on a number of different areas," he warned.

Industry will need to play a crucial role if Europe is to reduce emissions by 50 per cent by 2030, he argued, and he warned that "without CCS we simply cannot reach the climate targets we've set ourselves".

Noting that there are 34 projects awaiting funding decisions, he claimed that CCS is not currently economically viable and called for public funding alongside private investment in the technology.

The International Energy Agency's coal analyst Brian Ricketts claimed that a country's attitude to CCS could provide a "litmus test" for how serious it was about tackling climate change.

He said the use of coal in China has been growing by almost 200 million tonnes a year recently. "That's another Russia every year; another USA every four or five years," he said.

Ricketts criticised the slow response of the international community in tackling the climate problems posed by this increase. "CCS is an important part of that response to what is now a huge and urgent challenge," he argued.

"Without action we're on a path that will take us towards a 6°C temperature rise with dire consequences for millions."

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