“CCS is necessary if we are serious about fighting climate change, it’s as simple as that,” said EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs at the roundtable debate “Carbon capture and storage: Making it happen” held today at Friends of Europe.

“It is not about pumping money from taxpayers' pockets into energy companies”, added the Commissioner. “This is a business opportunity so there should be an element of risk.”

Yet according to Chris Davies MEP, European Parliament Rapporteur on CCS, "We must help the first users of CCS because it is a very risky investment. We must have money at European level because we introduced the cost of carbon at European level."

Graeme Sweeney, Shell’s Executive Vice President, CCS, Future Fuels & CO2 and Chairman of European Technology Platform for Zero Emission Fossil Fuel Power Plants (ETP-ZEP), stated that CCS has to be made neither at the expenses of energy efficiency nor of renewables. “We will need them all”. He also urged to take immediate action. If we need to deploy CCS by 2020, we need to start the demonstration now.

Monica Frassoni MEP, Co-President of the GREENS/EFA Group in the European Parliament and Trustee of Friends of Europe strongly disagreed with such views. “It is not shown that for the normal citizen in Europe it is more profitable to spend a hell of a lot of his own money on CCS in Europe than in renewables and energy efficiency. There is a competition between the two and you cannot deny this reality”.

Henry Edwardes-Evans, Managing Editor of Platts Power in Europe, commented that for industry representatives and policymakers the choice with regard to different energy technologies is a question of "one and the other", whereas for NGOs it is a question of "one or the other". “We still disagree on a number of points despite the urgency of the matter. We do not have the support for CCS yet and the European Parliament will tell us if we can count on it."

Click for a list of registered discussants.