Image credit: Ember (slide 101)
Yet even as the evidence mounts that the potential of CCS falls far, far short of what industry and governments claim, the CID continues the Commission’s support of it in numerous ways. Thanks to the Commission’s ‘foxes-welcome-in-the-hen-house’ approach to policy-making (see Box 2), the CID reflects industry’s desire to deregulate important environmental rules to speed up permitting for CO2 infrastructure.
Even as the evidence mounts that the potential of CCS falls far, far short of what industry and governments claim, the CID continues the Commission’s support of it in numerous ways
Central to the CID when announced in February 2025, was the promise of an Industrial Decarbonisation Accelerator Act, aiming to “Speed-up permitting” and address permitting “bottlenecks” for industrial decarbonisation. Tellingly, in her September 2025 State of the Union address Commission President von der Leyen dropped “decarbonisation” from the Act’s title, and the re-dubbed Industrial Accelerator Act is now expected to drop on 25th November.
The public consultation on the Act had an 80 per cent business response rate,4 and the consultation’s framing reiterated the goals of boosting competitiveness and accelerating administrative procedure – in other words, slashing planning procedures to make it quicker and easier for industry to get the go-ahead for projects. These are the same goals that Europe’s big business associations (which have an array of fossil fuel members) told the Commission the Act should have as part of “informal input” in January 2025, before the CID was even announced.5
Business groups demanded that the Act allow hydrogen and CO2 infrastructure projects to benefit from exemptions from EU environmental law such as environmental impact assessments
These business groups demanded that the Act allow hydrogen and CO2 infrastructure projects to benefit from exemptions from EU environmental law such as environmental impact assessments. They suggested loosening the scope of designated zones known as “acceleration areas” in the Renewable Energy Directive.6 These are existing areas where the permit process for renewable energy projects has been expedited; broadening the definition beyond renewables to include fossil fuel-enabling infrastructure would be an an environmental and climate disaster.
Sure enough the CID echoes these lobby demands for exemptions, suggesting the possibility that the Act may allow “tacit” approvals in cases of “overriding public interest” and for “certain pre-defined acceleration areas”. The danger here is that CCS projects and pipelines to carry CO2 to storage sites could be given the green light by default, so long as they’re defined as belonging to these categories. This could see massive infrastructure projects getting the go-ahead regardless of whether they’ll lead to real emissions cuts or the harmful impacts they might have, including on local ecosystems and biodiversity.
CO2 pipelines and storage facilities will cut through areas where people live, the natural environment, and the seas. This means that leakages of CO2 from this infrastructure come with significant risks: suffocation in humans and animals, contamination of drinking water and soils, and ocean acidification killing marine life. That is why there is widespread opposition to a new CO2 transport and storage law being introduced in Germany, which would automatically classify all CCS projects as being in the public interest. This classification will effectively curtail the right to public participation in the planning of CCS projects and restrict avenues for objections.
CO2 pipelines and storage facilities will cut through areas where people live, the natural environment, and the seas.
There are other reasons that throwing public money at big polluters to build vast CO2 infrastructure is a terrible idea. In early February 2025, CCS Europe wrote to the Commission President demanding that CSS must be a “strong component” of the CID, because, it warned, “in the past year, only one Final Investment Decision has been taken for a major CCS project within the Union, yet many hundreds of projects will have to be realised to reach the 2040 objective”.
The objective of capturing 280 million tonnes (Mt) of carbon by 2040, set out in the Industrial Carbon Management Strategy (see Box 2), is fantastically unrealistic. CCS projects have been failing to get off the ground for decades and EU countries have been capturing as little as 1 Mt of CO2 per year. Despite this, the Commission reassured CCS Europe that it is working on a specific legislative initiative to develop CO2 transportation infrastructure and a market for captured CO2 – and invited the lobby group to “keep providing us with input that will help advance CCS deployment”.
