meeting of EU climate ministers on June 21, Poland blocked a draft declaration on the matter, which also included support for finding ways of strengthening the ETS.
EU carbon permits for December have lost 30 percent this year because of oversupply concerns and speculation that the region’s debt crisis may worsen at the time when economic growth is slowing.
The commission, the EU’s regulatory arm in Brussels, first came up with the idea of setting aside allowances in the eight-year third phase of the emissions program in 2010 and then included a reference to such a tool in a March policy paper, known as the low-carbon 2050 road map.
While the commission and member states could agree to postpone the auctioning of some allowances without changing the EU emissions-trading directive, an eventual cancellation of permits after 2020 would require a revision of that law, a step that involves approval by the European Parliament and the council of ministers.
In June, the EU regulator suggested that the bloc may need to “recalibrate” the carbon-reduction plan by within holding a number of permits corresponding to extra emission reductions resulting from newly proposed efficiency measures.
“We need to make the case to the member states for the set aside, we need to make the case to the European Parliament, the commission and the council,” Sweeney said. “This is urgent.”
The commission would first need the green light from member states to come up with a draft measure on the set-aside, which could be gradually created from the pool of permits to be auctioned to companies by countries starting in 2013.
20. Title: Platts Headline: CCS knowhow ‘must be global’: Sweeney Date: 04/10/2011 Europe must extend its carbon capture and storage knowledgesharing efforts globally if the technology is to reach commercial viability by 2020, Dr Graeme Sweeney told Platts Monday. Sweeney, who is chairman of the Zero Emission Platform multi-stakeholder advisory group and Executive Vice President of CO2 at Shell, said the sector had to accept that funding 12 CCS demonstrations by 2015 was no longer realistic: “times are tough, and there is a slowdown in the investment rate for all capital projects, not just CCS,” he said. The EU’s NER-300 program has 13 CCS candidate projects and a number of innovative renewable energy projects up for funding. Some 300 million EU Allowances are to be sold to support the projects. With the price of CO2 at a 31-month low of Eur10.15/metric ton Monday, however, the sale of EUAs is going to raise less than first envisaged, and Europe can expect four-tosix CCS demonstrations by 2015, ZEP believes. “Member states need to work positively with a set of projects to create the circumstances for success,” Sweeney said. “It would be helpful if, like the UK, other member states looked at a carbon floor price.”
Sweeney remained positive that the benefits of demonstration would be undiluted in 2015, not least because other projects were making progress outside Europe, “and if we adopt the same approach to knowledge-sharing that we have in Europe for projects in North America and Australia, it is perfectly feasible that we will see sufficient demonstrations in train to deliver the same cost reductions, proving-out of technology and the public acceptance” as under a full European plan. On September 23, Germany’s Bundesrat upper house rejected a second attempt to transpose EU law on CCS, with regional lander strongly opposed to underground storage. While Sweeney was adamant that CCS must continue to be seen as a key element in the EU’s low carbon plan, he said proponents needed to “make more of the fact that in a clean energy future, CCS can deliver jobs, skills and potential for investment and revenue. This is a storyline that we need to place more emphasis on. There is not a single solution to climate change, but without CCS there is not a solution.”
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