Industrial carbon management (ICM) has seen an increasing uptick in supportive policies, commercial-scale projects, and innovation action in the EU in recent years. Policy frameworks under the Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), the Clean Industrial Deal, and the ICM Strategy are poised to further direct resources towards ICM projects as part of the EU’s technological portfolio for achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Despite these promising advances, important barriers remain in the deployment of ICM at pace and scale in Europe.
With many of the challenges faced by ICM being increasingly acknowledged by policymakers, the ongoing Horizon 2020 ConsenCUS project can provide additional policy insights. As an innovation action, it brings learnings for the roll-out of ICM, but also for the advancement of innovation in net-zero technologies in general. These findings are summarised in five polic recommendations and complement those issued in a previous policy paper published under the ConsenCUS project.
Firstly, the EU will require a balanced approach to supporting ICM technologies, both enabling next-generation technologies and deploying existing mature technologies. Secondly, the EU’s research and innovation (R&I) frameworks must acknowledge the importance of demonstrating, not just developing, innovative ICM technologies, and allocate appropriate financial resources to demonstrator projects. This must include an appreciation of fostering “learning-by-doing”, providing resource flexibility to react to unexpected challenges and aligning project success indicators with the long timelines for demonstrating new technologies in real operational conditions, including permitting requirements and technical challenges. Thirdly, policies and mechanisms to mitigate the high energy costs faced by industry, while still maintaining climate ambition, will be essential to ensure the operational feasibility of carbon capture.
Fourthly, support for ICM demonstration and deployment must acknowledge the trade-offs between technology characteristics such as cost, environmental footprint, capture efficiency, energy consumption, scalability potential, and others. Finally, R&I frameworks for developing and demonstrating ICM technologies must be relatively unbureaucratic and allow flexibility for project consortia to recruit expertise with minimal administrative constraints, supported by appropriate human and knowledge resources from EU agencies to match the scale of the EU’s ambitions on ICM. This will help ensure that ICM not only contributes to EU climate neutrality, but also to the reduction of an innovation deficit which has placed the Union in a challenging position with regards to its competitiveness
To enable CCS projects that contribute to Romania’s climate mitigation efforts in a cost-effective way, ambitions must be increased in national strategies, hard-to-abate sectors must be prioritised for CO2 capture, and the potential for negative emissions through carbon removal projects should be explored
This policy paper was written as part of the ConsenCUS project, funded through the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation programme under grant agreement N° 101022484.
Luciana Miu, EPG Head of Clean Economy
Luciana Miu is Head of Clean Economy at Energy Policy Group. She oversees the work of the Clean Economy division, including industrial decarbonisation, building energy efficiency, and climate governance and policy. Luciana also conducts in-depth research and stakeholder engagement primarily in the field of industrial decarbonisation and carbon capture and storage.
Luciana is an expert in industrial decarbonisation and building energy efficiency, with a focus on consumer behavior, systems thinking and policy. She is also trained in renewable energy engineering and a highly skilled communicator with significant experience in stakeholder engagement on sustainability projects. Luciana has extensive experience in data collection and analysis, including conducting nationally representative surveys and statistical analysis and modelling in STATA. She is also well-versed in behavioral frameworks and socio-technical systems approaches to sustainability.
She holds a PhD in energy efficiency from Imperial College London, and an MSc in Sustainable Energy Systems and BSc in Environmental Science from the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD thesis has resulted in 3 publications in peer-reviewed journals, including Energy Policy and Energy Research and Social Science.
Luciana is passionate about youth engagement in the energy transition, and is one of the founders of the European Youth Energy Network, the first network of youth-led, energy-focused organisations in the EU. She is a native speaker of Romanian and English, is fluent in French and has basic knowledge of German and Danish.
Contact: luciana.miu@epg-thinktank.org