The European Commission has approved under EU State aid rules a €150m Greek measure to support the construction of a carbon storage facility in Prinos.
The funding was made available through the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and contributes to achieving Greece’s climate targets and the EU’s strategic objectives under the European Green Deal. The facility is expected to start the ramp-up phase in 2027 and become fully operational in 2030.
The beneficiary is EnEarth, a Greek subsidiary of Energean, the exploration and production company focused on developing resources in the Mediterranean and North Sea.
The aid will partially finance the construction costs of the onshore and offshore infrastructure for the creation of the carbon storage facility.
It will be deployed in two phases, but only the first one will be financed under the current measure.
Under the first phase, EnEarth will deploy a large-scale pipeline to transport, from the onshore collecting site to the offshore storage site, up to 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year emitted by industrial players.
This ramp-up phase will precede the facility’s future expansion up to 2.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year planned under the second phase.
The aid will take the form of a direct grant, which will be disbursed in three instalments until 2026.
The grant will cover around 90% of the funding gap. If the project turns out to be very successful, generating extra net revenues, the beneficiary will return to Greece part of the aid received under the claw-back mechanism.
In September 2022, Energean obtained an exploration permit for CO2 storage in the Prinos field under national and European legal framework, and EnEarth formally submitted an application for a CO2 licence in July this year.
The objective of Prinos CO2 Storage is to contribute to local and regional decarbonisation efforts by storing captured CO2 from hard-to-abate economic activities, Direct Air Capture technologies and BECCS, and the shipping industry, among others.
The project is an integral part of the Mediterranean CCS Strategic Plan developed by France, Italy, and Greece, aiming to create the first industrial/commercial-scale CO2 storage hub in the south-east Mediterranean.
