CO2 storage:how fossil fuel companies “clean up” the environment by making money from it

Last week the European Union launched a new plan linked to Green Deal, The Net-Zero Industry Act. The plan, under discussion for a year, marks Brussels' action strategy for the years to come in the fields of technology for the production of renewable energy and geoengineering linked to carbon capture and storage.The European law would be a response toInflation Reduction Act US, which, among other things, has attracted billions of dollars in investments for the development and production of so-called green technologies.With regard to carbon capture and storage technologies, the new European legislation poses serious problems regarding the subjects identified for the development of the technology that should clean the air of emissions, as well as opening the doors to a new business that in the coming decades will be able yield several billion dollars in profit.These subjects, in fact, are none other than others the large companies in the oil industry.

The European Parliament and the Council of the EU have agreed new regulations to boost EU solar production, amid concerns over the profitability of Europe's solar manufacturing sector.Pursuant to Net Zero Industry Act (NZIA), EU Member States will be required to apply pre-qualification and award criteria not related to price for renewable energy projects, but rather to responsible business conduct, cyber and data security and the ability to deliver the project completely and on time.The EU bill doesn't come close not even close to the expense of 369 billion dollars foreseen byInflation Reduction Act American but, according to European politicians, it would still represent an important turning point.The plan, however, has some controversial aspects to say the least.

The bill, in fact, also carries forward the floor of the EU to build a network to capture and store carbon, setting the target of create 50 million tons of annual carbon storage capacity, ordering oil and gas companies to help fund the effort.Notably, the final legislation includes a penalty for fossil fuel companies that fail to comply.The controversial EU plan therefore wants to target some of the world's largest emitters to invest massively in new carbon capture and storage technologies (even for millennia), as part of its strategy to achieve climate neutrality.According to the EU, giants like Shell and ExxonMobil have the money, the know-how engineering and the structures necessary to rapidly grow an industry which is currently in an embryonic state and is not yet profitable, but which could soon become so (with the risk of creating a monopoly-oligopoly also on it, as happened with the oil industry).This is the one relating to carbon capture through techniques geoengineering, which aim to prevent emissions from the production cycle from reaching the air or even remove them from the air itself.

So, those who have polluted will now have to clean up the environment by being able to make a new one new business.The fact is:Will these companies have an interest in leaving the current model or, by virtue of the fact that they will operate with geoengineering to eliminate emissions, will they continue to extract and produce fossil energy?Once these fossil fuel multinationals have cleaned up the environment, or in any case eliminated a large part of emissions, won't they be encouraged to continue emitting and thus make a mountain of money in both sectors?If these companies can make billions by polluting, once large-scale geoengineering technologies are implemented and the carbon capture market explodes, the temptation to be able to make billions from emissions and billions from emissions capture it will certainly be a lot.

Ultimately, Europe demonstrates once again how much hypocrisy there is in environmental declarations and plans, which make no effort whatsoever to undermine power of certain nodes of the system, let alone the system itself, of which it is clearly a part.

[by Michele Manfrin]