Morocco Develops CO2 Storage Plan to Bypass EU Carbon Tax

"There are North African countries that have been working for three years to create transport and storage infrastructure because they have depleted their gas fields. The message they are sending to countries is to set up a plant on their territory, with CO₂ capture, and they will then send it to deep geological storage in depleted gas areas. All this at a reasonable price, as half of the infrastructure is built," says the Spanish Technological Platform for CO₂.

The new EU carbon tax requires member states to reduce their CO₂ emissions in their production. This is not the case in Morocco and Algeria. In Spain, there is a regulation to develop projects like the one underway in Algiers and Rabat, in accordance with a European directive. But no strategy is in place to promote this infrastructure, relays The Objective.

Among the many technologies used to capture CO₂, one of the best known is an installation that directly absorbs the gas coming out of factories and separates it from the carbon dioxide. This gas is then compressed and piped to the geological storage site or, if it is close to the coast, stored on a ship. The Spanish Ministry of Ecological Transition estimates that it "is not yet necessary" to develop this technology, due to the availability of green hydrogen.

In addition, the payment of the carbon tax will have negative effects on EU ports. "A ship leaving Shanghai (China), stopping in Algeciras and finally docking in Rotterdam, will pay the emissions from China to Spain and then from our country to the Netherlands. But if this ship calls at a port that is not on the EU list, such as Nador (Morocco), it will not be counted as coming from Shanghai, but from the North African port. A situation that encourages docking there, as the journey is shorter," analyze industry experts.