Reducing legal risk for CO2 transport for carbon capture and storage in the EU

Carbon-Capture and Storage (CCS) is a key technology in climate change mitigation. With fossil fuels continuing to be used in energy and power generation for the next several decades, CCS is an essential technology to reducing CO₂ emissions. An essential part of the CCS value chain is the transportation network necessary to link CO₂ emission areas with CO₂ storage facilities. This paper focuses on addressing one of the legal risks that has received little attention in the literature to date—contractual issues that different stakeholders will experience over the project. In essence, this paper aims to advance how risk in a CO₂ project, and therefore a CCS project, can be reduced. This will result in lower costs and therefore increase the viability of this technology option. The key policy implications are presented in this paper after a methodological process that involved incorporating analysis from an inter-disciplinary team of researchers, industry stakeholder meetings and a series of expert interviews.