Bridging the gap: improving the economic and policy framework for carbon capture and storage in the European Union
European Union countries need to significantly increase investments in carbon capture and storage and show much greater urgency and determination to develop and deploy the technology, according to a new report by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at London School of Economics and Political Science and the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The report estimates that an investment of between €18 and €35 billion is needed for the installation of 11 gigawatts of electricity generation with carbon capture and storage by 2030, as laid out by the European Commission’s ‘Energy Roadmap’. However, European Union policies have so far provided only €1.3 billion for the development of the technology, and few Member States have put forward incentives to support it. The authors of the report, led by Samuela Bassi, point out that all of the scenarios in the European Union’s ‘Energy Roadmap 2050’, to reduce annual emissions of greenhouse gases in line with the target of avoiding global warming of more than two centigrade degrees, involve the deployment of carbon capture and storage.