On this day, Jan 19, in 2015 “four of Europe’s biggest power utilities, represented in Brussels by Eurelectric, have decided to leave the European Commission’s CCS Technology Platform ZEP.“
The four were Germany’s RWE AG, France’s Electricite de France, Sweden’s Vattenfall AB and Spain’s Gas Natural Fenosa.
The ZEP had been set up in the mid-2000s as “a coalition of companies, scientists and environmental groups seeking ways to capture and bury heat-trapping carbon emissions mainly from the exhausts of coal, oil and gas-fired power plants.”
[On the EU’s “Zero Emissions Power Plant Programme”. See also 2011 article in Nature about Europe and CCS.]
Why? Well, money at stake. As a Bellona press release titled “Utilities feign interest in CCS to get public bail out” said
“Of the move, Bellona Europa Director Jonas Helseth said: – In their poorly concealed attempts to attain capacity payments, Europe’s utilities have misused the trust of the European Commission and Europe’s CCS community. It’s shameless how Eurelectric proudly announces the formation of a new CCS taskforce and ‘calls on policymakers to push ahead’, while simultaneously pulling out of Europe’s largest and widest coalition working on CCS.”
What happened next
Is there any CCS?
Why this matters.
We keep assuming we can deploy these technologies at massive scale, rapidly, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s one of the ways we avoid looking at how much some of us are emitting. There is trouble ahead.