Parliament adopts law to bury CO2 in the seabed

On Tuesday, June 17, Parliament approved a bill opening the door to sending millions of tons of CO2 abroad to be stored on the seabed, with the government seeing it as "a tool" for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.

The National Assembly finally adopted this text by 261 votes (from the central bloc to the National Rally) against 107 votes, mainly from the left of the chamber, which denounced "a headlong rush" to avoid reducing CO2 emissions.

At the heart of the debate: the fate of CO2 captured on an industrial site then compressed and liquefied, in order to bury it rather than see it released into the atmosphere. However, unlike its neighbors, such as Norway or Denmark, France does not have a storage site .

The London Protocol , an international text on pollution prevention, provides for a ban in principle on any export of waste for disposal at sea, and therefore for burial. This bill, also adopted by the Senate, thus intends to amend it and allow this export.

For the Minister of Industry and Energy, Marc Ferracci, it is a question of "giving our heavy industry the possibility of producing in France, without releasing into the atmosphere the carbon that it inevitably produces." Because, according to him, certain industrial sectors, such as steelmaking, cement or lime production, "will always emit CO2, even without fossil fuels." A "fatal" CO2, but "one that can be captured," the minister argued.

"Carbon capture will not replace the decarbonization effort," he tried to reassure. It is "on the contrary one of the essential tools to achieve our objectives" of carbon neutrality , according to him. It should represent between 8 and 13% of the effort to reduce emissions by 2050, in France as in Europe, he said.

But for environmentalists and rebels, this is a "new technological headlong rush" to "avoid tackling the source of the climate catastrophe," in the words of LFI MP Nathalie Oziol. For Communist MP Édouard Bénard, "hiding the dust under the carpet or the carbon under the oceans is not up to the task."

The rapporteur of the text, Macronist MP and former Minister of the Sea, Hervé Berville, recalled that this solution is supported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).