The biggest challenges for the CCS technology

One of the biggest challenges is to bring about acceptance of CCS, both politically and locally. In Germany for example, Vattenfall and CCS have won political support but we don’t know whether we have the full support of the locals around the storage sites. It’s clear that the practical communication task will be undertaken locally. The biggest challenge is to bringing about political and local acceptance of CCS. In the technical field on the other hand, the biggest challenge is to coordinate the choice of capture technology so that we gain knowledge of all three methods, Oxyfuel, Postcombustion and Precombustion.

Vattenfall is aiming for the first commercial CCS plant around 2020. It’s a tight deadline but it should be feasible. Developing a commercial CCS plant involves many technological challenges. We’ve reached the stage of development where we need to build a demonstration plant. Demonstration plants are a necessary precursor of commercial plants.

An important area that would clearly benefit from being coordinated is ensuring there is a coherent overview of financial support options at national and EU level. Neither pilot projects nor demonstration models are financially profitable in themselves and can only be implemented with support from development funds at both EU and national level.

Many things will contribute to reach Vattenfall’s targets to be CO₂-neutral by 2050, and CCS is just one part of the solution. At Vattenfall, we want to compete in as many technical fields as possible. We believe this contributes to developing the best solutions. Many people think it’s wrong to spend so much money on CCS. They think that the money should be spent on alternative fields. Vattenfall think it should be spent on both. It’s irresponsible not to do both.

Western countries must bear a large proportion of the development costs but, unless developing countries follow up and build CCS plants at their power plants, it won’t be possible to keep the rise in global warming to max. 2 degrees.