Storage Potentials for artificial CO2 products in Germany

To achieve the EU's net zero emissions target in 2050, unconventional measures to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere are urgently needed (IPCC, 2016). Due to the very tight remaining CO₂ budget, all illustrative model pathways in the IPCC special report on the 1.5°C target assume that net negative emissions must be achieved in the second half of the century. Direct storage of pure carbon dioxide has been investigated and is still applied, but limited depending on the location by restrictive laws, geological availability, and the uncertain long-term safekeeping. The NETPEC project strives to use photo-electro-chemical methods as energy source to produce easily storable, safe and sustainable carbon-sink products. These solid or liquid carbon-rich products can be long-term stored in the underground or at the surface.

The aim of the project part, which will be presented, was to create a database containing the storage potentials of Germany with respect to different end products with a large as possible carbon content. Further criteria for the storage sites are a guaranteed safe deposit for at least 1000 years, no negative influence on the surrounding biosphere and its living organisms and no negative interactions between product and repository of any kind. Due to large volumes of production from opencast and mining operations, sites that appear to be suitable in Germany are former open-pit and underground mines. In the case of a fluid product, various underground storage facilities such as hydrocarbon fields and pore storage complexes appear suitable too. In addition, a disposal of solid end products via regular landfills is conceivable. The collected data were provided by the state offices of the federal states and included both legal office maps in raster format which were digitalized and supplemented by other provided or public data as well as shape files with attributes. Depending on the information provided by the states, the database contains the location, the name of the location, owner of the location, area of the location, type of authorization, type of natural resource and for some states also the extracted volumes of the resources.

Production quantities and volumes can be used to compare the capacities of potential storage sites with the volume of the CO₂ product. As an interim result, both the qualitative opportunities and the quantitative potentials for final repository of solid or liquid carbon-rich product near the surface or underground are shown and illustrate the clearly widely distributed, large potential of the extensive volumes for storage in Germany.