Based on the trend emissions of large emitting industrial facilities, their difficulties in reducing CO2 emissions, and their potential sectoral commitments to CCUS technology, candidate industries were selected to develop regional CCUS scenarios. Of the eight regions evaluated, the top three regions where CCUS is more attractive than EU ETS compliance are (1) Upper Silesia (4 302 M€ of lower costs with CCUS compared to EU ETS costs), followed by (2) Paris Basin (1 411.9 M€), and then Northern Croatia with 1109.5 M€ of financial gap. These results are highly influenced by the EU-ETS scenario price.
The share of CO2 avoided through CCUS in the national greenhouse gas reduction strategy in 2050 varies from 9% for Western Macedonia, the Rhone Valley, and the Paris Basin for the lowest, to 33% for the Ebro Basin region, 43% for the Upper Silesia region, and 66% for the Lusitanian Basin which is the highest.
Across the eight regions, nearly 78% of the CO2 captured is ultimately avoided taking into account the CO2 released to the atmosphere in fast‐moving consumer goods (like e-fuels). The amount of CO2 avoided (357 Mt) is greater than the amount of CO2 stored (343 Mt) due to the long‐term use of CO2 in mineralization (Western Macedonia and Ebro Basin).
In average, OPEX costs contribute 63% of total CCUS costs and are mainly energy consumption. These expenses should be reduced as main priority to reduce the cost of the CCUS chain and CO2 emissions associated. Capture costs generally represent a significant portion of total costs.
The challenge of some scenarios was to match estimated storage capacity with accumulated emissions during the period considered between 2025 and 2050. Upper Silesia (PL) and Rhône Valley (FR) are high emission regions with insufficient local geological storage resources. An attempt of building transnational scenarios showed how it is possible to increase the quantity of CO2 captured through cross-border transport of CO2 to regions with greater storage capacity, thus confirming storage capacity as one of the strong limiting parameters for the development of scenarios.
A case study in Portugal analysed the benefit of disaggregating the CCUS network in sub-systems of minor scale to launch CCUS technology. These sub-systems would connect large infrastructures at national scale in a second period, which alerts us to the need for long-term planning for CCUS infrastructures deployment.
The net drop in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of scenarios needs to account for potential indirect environmental effects. Life cycle assessment (LCA) performed in Rhône valley (FR), Lusitanian Basin (PT) and Ebro Basin (ES) demonstrated the impact of capture process (mainly related to energy provision) as the most critical contributor to generated GHG emissions and significantly to Cumulative Energy Demand (CED). The storage of biogenic CO2 occurring in some regions implies negative emissions which are determinant in the global GHG balance. The impacts of CO2 utilization strongly depend on the final use of CO2 and on the transformation process settings (e.g. renewable power consumption for energy needs). In these three regions, Multi-Regional Input-Output analysis (MRIO) assessed socioeconomic benefits of CCS deployment. CCS would create 276,200 full time equivalent (FTE) jobs up to year 2050, both direct and indirect. That is approximately 11,050 permanent jobs. In three regions, the employment retained would be 203,300 FTE jobs (74%), or 8,130 permanent jobs.
