Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/12/12
An early tally of money earned from the gradual sale of 200 million CO2 credits on the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme indicates that the European Investment Bank has made €1.6 billion ($2 billion) for carbon capture and storage and innovative renewables projects in the region. In its final monthly report of CO2 allowances sold for the European Commission’s New Entrants Reserve competition released this week, the Bank said that it sold 18.85 million allowances in September for a preliminary total of €154.13 million before fees. Once added to the balance of the 200 million allowances sold since December for the first batch of NER projects, that amount totals to €1.6 billion before fees, EIB said.
Despite that preliminary figure, it is still unclear at the moment how much will subsequently delegated for each CCS and renewables project under the competition. A report on final totals will be published in the coming weeks, an EIB spokesman said. However, individual projects are not expected to earn much. A provision in NER 300 guidelines says that no more than 15 percent of the amount earned can go to any one project. Using that math, that means that a CCS project could hope for no more than about €240 million ($385 million), a fraction of the EU assistance that many project operators were initially expecting from the competition. Early estimates from when the competition was first announced said that cashing in the first batch of credits could garner between €5 billion and €6 billion ($6.4 billion to $7.7 billion), enough to substantially fund six to eight large-scale CCS projects. However, that modeling was based on a pre-recession CO2 price of about €30 per ton. EIB said this week that the 200 million in the first batch of credits sold at an average price of €8.05/each. CCS projects in the U.K., Poland and the Netherlands are expected to be first in line for funding.
