Eni and Snam to Build Italy's First Offshore Carbon-Storage Project

Eni is joining forces with energy infrastructure company Snam to build Italy's first offshore carbon storage project, Ravenna CCS. 

The first phase of the Ravenna CCS project will capture 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide from Eni's Casalborsetti plant in Ravenna. The gas will be pumped by pipeline to the Porto Corsini Mare Ovest offshore platform, where it will be injected into a depleted gas field for permanent storage. 

"Phase 1 of the Ravenna Project will allow to reduce emissions from the Casalborsetti power plant, launching in Italy a project based on a mature technological process," said Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi in a statement. "CCS is complementary to renewables, to energy efficiency solutions and to the other available levers, and is central to avoiding CO2 emissions from highly energy-intensive sectors."

Eni says that the project lays the groundwork for abating emissions from all kinds of shoreside sources, like steel mills, cement plants, ceramics and chemical industries. This would allow industrial operations to continue as before, using existing infrastructure without releasing CO2. Phase 2 of the project would expand storage capacity to four million tonnes of CO2 annually, about half of it from Eni's own operations in the region and the other half from other nearby industrial emitters. 

"CCS projects are being developed globally and are already at an advanced stage both in Europe - especially in the UK, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries - and in the US. This joint venture sets the first initiative in Italy with the ambition to offer a solution to the entire hard-to-abate production cluster in the Po Valley," said Snam CEO Stefano Venier. 

Eni is also an active participant in CCS projects in the UK, where it has joined the HyNet regional initiative to store carbon from a full range of industrial emitters in the country's northwest. Taken on its own, HyNet will satisfy the UK government's 2030 target to achieve 10 million tonnes per year of CO2 storage. 

Eni has also submitted plans for capturing and storing carbon from heavy industry in the UK's southeast, using the storage capacity of the depleted Hewett offshore gas field. The development could store up to 330 million tonnes of CO2 if approved.