Antwerp: Officials at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges spent the morning briefing visiting Commission staff on the next phase of the Industrial Carbon Management Strategy, with a particular focus on the transport infrastructure that will move captured carbon dioxide from coastal industrial clusters toward subsea storage in the North Sea. The visit comes as the Commission prepares its first formal stocktake of the strategy, published in early 2024, against the trajectory that would deliver fifty million tonnes of annual capture capacity by 2030.
Antwerp’s position in the strategy has shifted over the last eighteen months from prospective to anchoring. The Antwerp@C cluster, which gathers BASF, Borealis, INEOS, ExxonMobil, Air Liquide, and Total Energies, has aligned its capture and shipping plans with the Aramis project for storage off the Dutch coast and the Northern Lights consortium operating from western Norway. Final investment decisions on several of these projects have been confirmed in the past quarter, putting Antwerp on track to handle an early share of the European capture pipeline by 2028.
The strategy itself sets a layered set of targets. By 2030, the Union aims for fifty million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide to be captured and either stored permanently or used in long-life industrial applications. By 2040, the figure climbs to two hundred and eighty million tonnes, with a 2050 ambition of four hundred and fifty million tonnes that would represent a structural element of the bloc’s net zero economy. The challenge, as Antwerp’s planners frequently note, lies less in capture itself than in the transport corridors and storage permits that need to be in place to receive that volume.
The Commission’s stocktake will assess progress against four pillars. The first concerns capture technology deployment in hard-to-abate sectors, including cement, lime, steel, and chemicals, where direct emission reductions remain technically constrained. The second focuses on transport infrastructure, including pipelines, river barges, and dedicated shipping fleets, and on the harmonised technical standards that allow cross-border movement of compressed carbon dioxide. The third tackles geological storage capacity, which the strategy estimates must reach at least fifty million tonnes per year of available injection capacity by 2030 across at least three storage sites operated within the Union. The fourth deals with carbon utilisation, in particular for synthetic fuels and chemical feedstocks where life-cycle emissions can be sharply lowered.
Several pieces of legislation feed the strategy. The Net Zero Industry Act requires oil and gas producers to contribute storage capacity in proportion to their historical output, with the first allocation cycle currently being administered by national authorities. The CO2 Storage Directive is being updated to streamline permitting timelines. The state-aid framework has been adapted to allow capital expenditure support for first-of-a-kind capture projects, and the Innovation Fund has channelled multiple billion-euro tranches into the cluster build-out.
Antwerp’s port authority pressed the Commission staff on three specific bottlenecks. The first concerns cross-border pipelines and the licensing regime that would govern shared infrastructure with the Netherlands and Germany. The second touches on the absence of a Union-level methodology for granting carbon transport tariffs, which has left several operators waiting for national regulators to act. The third focuses on the recognition of captured biogenic carbon dioxide within the Emissions Trading System, an issue that affects cement and pulp clusters more directly than chemicals.
The Commission delegation indicated that the stocktake will sit alongside a wider Industrial Deal package due before the summer recess, with measures on energy pricing, lead markets for clean industrial products, and access to capital for industrial decarbonisation. Antwerp will host one of the formal stakeholder workshops feeding into that package next month, putting the port at the centre of the bloc’s industrial transformation conversation for a second consecutive year.
