I computed Europe’s industrial CO₂ emitters against port and railway networks.
The LNG industry took 30 years and billions in stranded assets to learn that shared infrastructure makes the economics work. Same goes for CO₂ shipping.
This is the way.
europe-industrial-emitters-100-750-ktpa.png
In short, the problem is mostly a mid-sized emitter problem.
Roughly 60% of Europe’s industrial CO₂ point sources fall in the 100-750 ktpa band. They account for 30% of regional emissions across the 17 countries that I did the data analysis on.
Flagship transport solutions currently prioritise large, high-purity volumes to de-risk early operations (which makes sense), but the majority of sources by count aren’t in that tier.
europe-emitter-market-segment.png
Port access (and the route to the only proven storage in the North Sea) is very uneven.
The IQR spread in distance to port is roughly 200 km; from 1 km at the lower quartile to 210 km at the upper. Within the mid-sized band it scales with size: 75 km mean for the smallest plants, 25 km for the largest.
Smaller emitters face longer distances with less capital to bridge them.
europe-emitter-port-distance.png
Railway access tells a different story.
Across all segments (small, mid-sized, large, massive) the IQR spread in distance to nearest railway is just 3 km. Lower quartile sits at 1 km, upper at 4 km. Mean distances are stable at 1-2 km regardless of emitter size or country.
The uniformity is not surprising. Industrial plants are where they are because railways are often already there.
europe-emitter-distance-to-railway.png
With wildly uneven port access and remarkably uniform rail access, there is an infrastructure priority list to be made.
For inland mid-sized emitters, rail-to-port terminals (a bit like a postal system for CO₂) are the near-term lever. Pipelines would be nice, but uncertain future demand makes it tough to plan at present. Bespoke quays are also impractical at this scale.
The LNG industry learned that shared hubs beat bespoke builds. The same goes for CO₂ transport, so doubling down on shared port hubs and rail-to-port terminals for now makes sense.
My essay goes deeper, also on the shipping bottlenecks that don’t show up in the distance data but compound the infrastructure problem significantly: https://olivertedwards.com/posts/scaling-co2-economies-via-ports/