TEN-E

Italy aiming for CO2 exports to Prinos facility by early 2030

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Italy is focusing on efforts to export captured CO2 quantities for storage in Greece starting early next decade.

A joint carbon capture and storage (CCS) project involving Greece, Italy and France, also open to the participation of other countries in the future, was presented earlier this year in the neighboring country’s revised National Energy and Climate Plan, as part of the TEN-E regulation, offering guidelines for cross-border energy infrastructure.

Rome is seeking to channel CO2 quantities to Greece for storage at the depleted Prinos field. According to Italy’s NECP, facilities with a capacity of 3.6 million tons per year will be built in Italy to offer export potential to Greece from the first half of 2030.

As a next step, Italy needs to complete a regulatory framework for carbon capture, before establishing related bilateral contacts with Greece.

The underground Prinos storage facility is planned to be operational no sooner than three years from now, with an initial CO2 storage capacity of between 0.5 and 1 million tons, which could be boosted in the future.

The project has been included in the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), while an application has also been submitted for EU Innovation Fund support.

New gas project support to end, aid until 2029 for conversions

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EU funding support for new natural gas and oil-related projects is expected to end soon, but will remain available over a transition period until December 31, 2029 for natural gas projects and gas transportation and storage infrastructure conversions catering to hydrogen, natural gas and biomethane needs before ultimately serving as hydrogen transportation and storage facilities, exclusively.

The council of EU energy ministers accepted Trans-European Energy Networks (TEN-E) regulation revisions incorporating these funding support changes at a meeting in Luxembourg.

The revisions, designed to help the EU achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, are planned to be implemented in 2022, if ratified.

The revisions also include measures designed to offer sustained protection for market competition and energy supply security.

The proposed revisions identify 11 priority energy corridors and three thematic priority areas for projects of common interest funded through the Connecting Europe Facility (2021-2027).

Brussels forwards new PCI list, to be finalized late this year

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The European Commission’s fifth PCI (Projects of Common Interest) list in the electricity and natural gas sectors, being forwarded for public consultation, features, for now, a number of project additions and removals, compared to the previous edition.

Market officials and state authorities will have the opportunity to offer their views and observations over the consultation procedure’s twelve-week period before the European Commission adopts a finalized version of the fifth PCI list towards the end of 2021, based on an existing Trans-European Networks for Energy (TEN-E) framework, focused on linking the energy infrastructure of EU countries.

PCI projects are entitled to EU funding support. Brussels authorities introduced selection criteria revisions in December, ascertaining, however, that the impact of all projects, especially on CO2 emissions, will be appraised when finalizing the PCI list’s fifth edition.

The provisional list includes a number of electricity and gas sector projects concerning Greece.

Electricity-sector projects involving Greece include: a Bulgarian-Greek grid interconnection, expected to be completed in 2023; an Egyptian-Greek-Libyan grid interconnection headed by Green Power 2020 and scheduled for delivery in 2025; as well as three Egypt-Greece interconnections, two of these featuring Kykladika Meltemia SA as project promoter and expected to be respectively completed in 2025 and 2028, and a third headed by Elica SA and scheduled for completion in 2028.

An energy storage project planned by Eunice for Ptolemaida, northern Greece, and scheduled for completion in 2022 is a new entry on the PCI list.

In the natural gas sector, the PCI list includes: the Alexandroupoli FSRU (2022); a subsea pipeline between Greece and Italy, known as the Poseidon Pipeline (2025); EastMed, a pipeline planned to carry natural gas from the east Mediterranean to European markets, via Crete (2025); a compressor station in Thessaloniki’s Nea Mesimvria area (2022); a metering and regulating station in Megalopoli, Peloponnese (2025); a compressor station in Abelia, in Greece’s mid-north (2023); a compressor station in Kipoi, northeastern Greece (2024); a pipeline link for the Alexandroupoli FSRU (2022); a TAP pipeline capacity increase (2025); and the development of an underground gas storage facility (UGS) in the almost depleted natural gas field of “South Kavala” in northern Greece (2023).