‘Ravenna’s False Solution’ is ReCommon’s new report on the first carbon capture and storage (CCS) project promoted by Eni and Snam in Emilia Romagna. By 2030, CCS infrastructure will be expanding by leaps and bounds, but in the meantime the first phase is benefiting from extraordinary regulatory and economic concessions, with blatant conflicts of interest and exemptions of convenience, such as avoiding environmental impact assessments. All this for a rather inefficient, expensive and risky technology.
‘The CCS legislation is yet another favour to the national fossil champions, namely Eni and Snam. This is despite CCS being controversial because it is very expensive and inefficient. It is very likely that in the years to come, as is the case in the UK, it will be government funding that will be responsible for the high cost of CCS,’ says Eva Pastorelli of ReCommon, author of the report.
‘The area affected by CCS project development is already severely affected by extreme weather events and subsidence. The construction of new infrastructure on land and in the sea therefore poses additional risks but above all still binds the area to a fossil fuel model that represents its curse,’ commented Elena Gerebizza, co-author of the report.
The project
The project is called Ravenna CCS and is the first carbon dioxide capture and storage project being implemented in Italy on the initiative of the two major publicly controlled fossil fuel companies, Eni and Snam. The project has evolved from the initial proposal made by Eni in 2021 as part of the national resilience and recovery plan (PNRR). Now it combines carbon capture and storage with a series of offshore and onshore infrastructure to capture and transport CO2 from Emilia Romagna and Veneto regions to Eni’s Casalborsetti plant in the province of Ravenna. Here is the power plant where the gas extracted by Eni from the several offshore fields in the northern Adriatic Sea is collected and processed. This power station is the first plant to which Eni applies CO2 capture technology and, by reusing existing and repurposed pipelines, it wants to transport 25,000 tonnes per year to the depleted Porto Corsini Mare Ovest field. To Ravenna CCS is thus connected the Pianura Padana CCS project,which envisages the construction, again in Casalborsetti, of a compressor station where the CO2initially collected from the industrial areas of Ferrara and Ravenna, and subsequently also from the industrial area of Marghera, will be conveyed, with a network of about 100 kilometres of pipelines dedicated to the transport of CO2, to be built almost entirely. The collection of CO2 from these plants would take place in the so-called Phase 2, or industrial phase of the project, starting in 2027, in which Eni and Snam promise to transport and store, this time permanently, up to 4 million tonnes of CO2peryear by 2030. But the dreams of ‘gigantism’ go beyond this, with further expansion in an even bigger project called Callisto and led by the French company Air Liquide. Callisto envisages the liquefaction and transport by ship of CO2 collected in the industrial hub of the Rhone Valley, Marseille and Fos, to Eni’s offshore fields off Ravenna. In its transnational form, the project is included in the framework of European Projects of Common Interest, will be eligible for funding, and will involve the overall movement and storage of up to 16 million tonnes of CO2 per year.
A ‘friendly’ regulation for fossil fuel corporations
Article 7 of Law No. 11 of February 2nd 2024 seems to contain a blatant conflict of interest in the part where it foresees that the Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security can rely on ‘(…) companies with proven experience in the sectors of carbon capture, transport and storage (...)’ to prepare a study structuring the entire regulatory framework, as well as the technical, economic and financial regulation of the CCS sector in Italy. This passage delineates a scenario in which it will be up to Eni and Snam themselves to ‘(…) define the modalities for remuneration and eventual support mechanisms for the different phases of the capture, transport, utilisation and storage of CO2’.In other words, the companies that promote CCS as a central technology for the decarbonisation process are the ones that could write, and benefit from, a regulation that could recognise them lavish remuneration and incentives for ‘the service’ offered. Remuneration that will most likely come from the state budget, as has already happened in the UK. Here, fossil fuel corporations intensively lobbied the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero to secure subsidies for the CCS sector: the companies, including Eni, obtained a commitment from the Labour government to allocate almost 22 billion pounds (more than 26 billion euros) over 25 years to finance CO2 capture and storage projects.
The regulation was even more generous with Eni and Snam, which benefited from an exception allowing experimental projects for storage of up to 100,000 tonnes of CO2to start without an environmental impact assessment. However, from the industrial phase, the Ravenna CCS project will have to obtain a permit that also includes an impact assessment.
Costs borne by the state and communities
Under the CCS legislation, all obligations relating to monitoring and surrendering emission allowances in the event of leakage are transferred from companies to the Ministry of Economic Development (now Ministry of Environment and Energy Security) after only twenty years – or even earlier, if certain conditions are met. Thus it is not taken into account that the capture of CO2 underground falls within the domain of geological processes, which take place on a much longer time scale than that of humans. Today, it is impossible to determine the risk of CO2leakages from CCS deposits through existing geological structures or as a result of natural catastrophic events such as earthquakes, which may occur even in the distant future. This underestimation of the risk is even more alarming if we consider that the Ravenna CCS project is located in an area that has already been affected by the phenomenon of subsidence induced by mining, storage, and fluid injection activities on offshore and onshore fields.
In addition, Eni and Snam have been exempted from submitting a surety guarantee to cover costs in the event of significant leakages or irregularities, since the project is ‘experimental’ and is therefore being facilitated in its development, both in economic terms and in terms of authorisation, as it has not been subjected to the scrutiny that an environmental impact assessment would have required.
Yet the highest costs will once again be borne by the communities affected by the industrial phase of the Ravenna CCS project, which will see the construction of on-land infrastructure that will transport CO2 for hundreds of kilometres: from the province of Ferrara to the province of Ravenna, crossing inhabited and built-up areas but also valuable natural areas and Natura 2000 Network sites. Laying hundreds of kilometres of pipelines carrying CO2, which at a concentration of 4% in the atmosphere becomes asphyxiating, means tying any future decisions on territorial management to the protection and safety of these infrastructures. What cost-benefit analysis could justify such burdensome economic and social consequences, considering that the benefits of a ‘solution’ like CCS are doubtful? It is a question that remains open, because unfortunately the cost-benefit analysis document is not publicly accessible.
An ineffective and risky technology
A study published in 2022 by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) revealed that 10 of the 13 analysed largest CCS plants in the world (amounting to about 55% of the nominal installed capture capacity globally) are either vastly underperforming or have failed.The economic and environmental performance of CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilisation, and Storage) projects approved to date was analysed in 2023 by Oil Change International, which comes to even more alarming conclusions. Not only do major CCS plants in the US, Australia, and the Middle East operate at significantly reduced capacities (between 10 and 60 per cent), but most operational CCS plants use CO2 to further extract hydrocarbons through the Enhanced Oil Recovery process. The study concludes that ‘many of the world’s largest CCS projects promise too much and deliver too little’. Again, in 2023, an Oxford University research team published a detailed study of the economic feasibility of various IPCC scenarios with CCS. The conclusion is that governments that put CCS at the centre of national decarbonisation strategies risk locking themselves into disadvantageous and uncompetitive strategies.
Among the incidents recorded so far, a notable case is that of Satartia, Mississippi,where in February 2020, following the rupture of a CO2 pipeline, the entire population of the village was evacuated. As CO2 concentrations increase and exposure times lengthen, the gas causes a range of effects from loss of consciousness to coma and death. Even at lower levels, CO2 can act as an intoxicant.The CCS Pianura Padana project seems to be built on a gamble: that everything will be fine. In addition to being exposed to the sadly known extreme weather events, the provinces of Ravenna and Ferrara are also inhabited. Any accident would directly impact the people living in the area through which the pipelines pass. Looking ahead to the future, linked to Phase 2, it should also be pointed out that a large part of the section of the pipeline to be built between Ferrara and Casalborsetti, which affects the municipalities of Argenta and Alfonsine, falls in a seismic zone. This factor is not put into relation with the effect that a seismic event could have on onshore infrastructures, nor with the effect that the massive high-pressure injection of CO2 (which assumes a liquid state under these conditions) into the offshore fields would have on the subsoil
