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Germany Revives Underground Carbon Capture Plan in Sign of Climate Struggle

Germany Revives Underground Carbon Capture Plan in Sign of Climate Struggle

(Bloomberg) -- German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is reviving the idea of storing carbon-dioxide emissions underground as the nation struggles to achieve its climate targets.

Europe’s biggest carbon emitter effectively scrapped plans earlier this decade to bury millions of tons of the climate warming gas, bowing to cost pressures and local opposition. That was after pilot runs led by government researchers, RWE AG, Siemens AG and Vattenfall AB.

As Merkel’s coalition ponders how to slash carbon emissions across the economy to meet Paris Climate Treaty targets over the next decade, carbon capture and storage, or CCS, is staging a potential revival. Brushing the dust off mothballed CCS plans underscores the scale of concern in Berlin over Germany’s ability to meet its Paris goals.

Germany Revives Underground Carbon Capture Plan in Sign of Climate Struggle

“We have to debate CCS,” Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said Saturday in a Deutsche Presse Agentur report. “There’s long been opposition to the subterranean storage of carbon dioxide because it was supposed to prolong power generation from coal -- now that we have an exit from coal that reservation’s out of the way.”

The comments are a clear sign that Germany aims to add CCS to its armory of tools to achieve its climate goals. Merkel has also floated plans to apply a levy of some sort on pollution from transport and buildings, industries that aren’t covered by Europe’s existing cap-and-trade Emissions Trading Scheme.

Germany has set itself the goal of reducing carbon dioxide output 55% by 2030 from 1990 levels. It’s faltering in its efforts with emissions only down 31% by next year.

The International Energy Agency predicts CCS technology can cut global carbon dioxide output 14% by 2050.

Germany Revives Underground Carbon Capture Plan in Sign of Climate Struggle

“CCS is a safe and proven technology,” said Annya Schneider, a senior adviser at the Global CCS Institute in Brussels, an advocacy group, in a note to Bloomberg. Some 43 large-scale CCS facilities operate globally, 18 of them as commercial undertakings, and a further 25 are in various stages of development, said Schneider.

Once captured, carbon dioxide is pumped deep underground, where it remains trapped in the fine pores of suitable rock types such as sandstone for millions of years, advocates say. CCS mirrors a natural process that has trapped natural resources such as oil and gas underground for millions of years.

The German government has tried CCS before. The public-funded Ketzin pilot plant west of Berlin stored 67,000 tons of carbon dioxide emitted from local coal-fired power generation over the 13 years of its operation. It was shuttered in 2017 amid protests from local residents.

The opposition Green party says Merkel and Schulze may be fooling themselves in thinking there’s voter appetite for CCS. As many as 1,000 local protest groups emerged in recent years to block new wind parks and the related upgrades to the grid in their vicinity.

“Digging up CCS is like flogging a dead horse in this country,” said Annalena Baerbock, the co-chairwoman of the Green party. She said the technology only has a narrow application and to suggest it has a broader potential “raises false hopes, a possible moral hazard and is a distraction from the fundamental national task of reducing carbon dioxide.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Brian Parkin in Berlin at bparkin@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Reed Landberg at landberg@bloomberg.net, Andrew Reierson, Rob Verdonck

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