Towards a CO2 infrastructure in North-Western Europe: Legalities, costs and organizational aspects

This paper serves to highlight work completed within the EU FP7 CO(2)Europipe project, which aims to provide guidance to elements of an EU master plan for the development of large scale European CO2 infrastructure. In the last 5 years there have been some significant advancements in EU and international regulations that serve to facilitate CO2 transportation, however there is little guidance on how multi-user transport networks should be organized and financed. Poor planning and initial underinvestment in CO2 pipeline capacity can lead to inefficient networks and higher lifetime costs. Although shipping of CO2 may be a favourable transport option under certain circumstances, the monitoring and verification guidelines for this form of CO2 transportation are currently deficient. Cost estimates have been provided by industrial project members for CO2 pipelines (on/offshore), compression and shipping. Economies of scale are exhibited for pipelines, shipping and compression installations, however in order for operators to take advantage of economies of scale in pipelines, the intentions of governments regarding the regulation of tariffs for third-party network users need to be consolidated as soon as possible. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd.