Italian energy companies Eni and Snam’s carbon capture and storage (CCS) project in Ravenna, Italy, will serve Italian and European hard-to-abate sectors such as the steel industry. European energy-intensive industries will prefer to store their CO2 in Italy rather than other facilities in Europe, a source close to Eni tells Kallanish.
The project will store CO2 in depleted gas reservoirs off the coast of Ravenna. In 2022, Eni and Snam signed an agreement to create an equally owned joint venture and develop Phase 1 of the Ravenna CCS project, which will be launched in 2024. This includes the capture of 25,000 tonnes of CO2 emitted from Eni’s natural gas treatment plant in Casalborsetti.
“Once captured, the CO2 will be piped to the Porto Corsini Mare Ovest platform and injected into the homonymous depleted gas field in Ravenna’s offshore,” the firms explain in a project presentation.
While CCS projects have been developed globally, this represents the first Italian effort and aims at decarbonising the entire hard-to-abate production cluster in the Po Valley. It will also target other Italian regions and countries in the Mediterranean area.
The Ravenna CCS hub’s phase two is scheduled to start in 2027 and aims to store 4 million t/year of CO2. Of this, 1mt will come from plants owned by Eni and the remaining 3mt will be reserved for other industrial emitters. Eni and Snam say they are in talks with hard-to-abate industries in the region including steel and have signed a letter of intent with four polluters in the Ravenna industrial area.
“Total storage resource in the Adriatic is estimated at 500 million tonnes, giving the possibility in subsequent development phases to increase storage capacity to more than 10 million tonnes/year, covering the decarbonisation needs of additional clusters,” the project presentation concludes.
Natalia Capra France
