CO₂ Capture and Storage: A Geopolitical Issue

Hitherto, no large-scale power plant, fully integrated with CCS, including monitoring and verification, has become operational. It may still take years until this happens on a bona-fide basis. The most plausible reasons are high cost, commercial uncertainty, lack of a foreseeable regulatory framework, problems pertaining to bankability, and, last but not least, liability for the stored CO₂. In this paper, attention is paid to the necessity of CCS and to its relative importance in a geopolitical context. The backdrop comprises a subset of global concerns and challenges relating to the growing energy demand and, thus, the harnessing of fossil fuels and their impact on the issue of global warming