Cementir Holding, the cement company controlled by Francesco Caltagirone, will receive a subsidy from the Danish government for a carbon capture and storage project in Denmark.
PUBLIC AID TO AALBORG PORTLAND
The recipient of the aid will be, specifically, Aalborg Portland, a Danish white cement producer controlled by Cementir, of which Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone holds 66.7 percent of the capital.
The company – which today announced the signing of the agreement with the Danish Energy Agency – will receive about 117 euros for every ton of carbon dioxide captured, up to a maximum of 147 million euros per year for a period of fifteen years.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ACCSION PROJECT FOR CO2 CAPTURE
Carried out in collaboration with the French industrial gas company Air Liquide and the British oil company Harbour Energy, the Accsion project by Aalborg Portland is a CO2 capture and storage plant located in northern Jutland, an area in northern Denmark. It is expected to become operational in 2030 and capture 1.4 million tons of CO2 per year from cement plants, contributing nearly 40 percent to Denmark’s industrial emissions reduction targets.
The project has received about 215 million euros in European funds from the Innovation Fund and has been designated as the first strategic net-zero project in Denmark under the European Net-Zero Industry Act.
THE CHALLENGING DECARBONIZATION OF CEMENT
Carbon capture is a technology not yet established commercially but very promising for the decarbonization of non-electrifiable industries. In simple terms, it allows the “sequestration” of CO2 emitted by factories which, instead of ending up in the atmosphere, is stored underground within geological formations suitable for this purpose.
Cement production is particularly polluting: to produce one ton of this hydraulic binder, approximately one ton of CO2 is emitted. Currently, it is impossible to produce cement without emitting CO2 because this greenhouse gas is both released by the fossil fuels that provide the heat necessary for the process and generated by the transformation reaction of the raw material (limestone, which contains calcium oxide and carbon dioxide).
CEMENTIR HOLDING’S EMISSIONS GOAL
“With this agreement, we can now take the decisive step towards realizing a project that is not only large-scale in the Danish context but ranks among the largest industrial CO2 capture projects in Europe,” said Aalborg Portland CEO Soren Holm Christensen.
The Accsion project “will enable Cementir to be at the forefront of decarbonization and demonstrate how hard-to-abate sectors can be transformed on a large scale,” commented Cementir Holding CEO Francesco Caltagirone Jr. The group aims to achieve carbon neutrality for Scope 1 emissions (direct emissions) at its European cement plants.
