The Vault of the Adriatic: The New Geopolitics of Carbon Dioxide

Translated by Giulia Girardi

The manufacturing processes in Southern Europe are now facing a decisive turning point. From the steel mills and cement plants of the Po Valley, to the petrochemical clusters of Fos-Marseille in France and the industrial hubs of the Balkans, the productive fabric that underpins the continent’s strategic autonomy and employment is striving to achieve unprecedented decarbonization targets. ETS — the Emissions Trading System — allowances are no longer merely an environmental metric, but a lever of global competitiveness: for energy-intensive industrial value chains, the economic cost of carbon emissions has become increasingly difficult to bear. Furthermore, the rhetoric of total electrification is revealing its structural limitations. For so-called hard-to-abate sectors, where CO2 emissions stem not only from energy consumption but also from the chemical reactions that are part of the production process, renewable energy alone is not enough to achieve the net-zero emissions target. To safeguard the survival of these industries without relocating production beyond European borders, the only mature and scalable industrial solution is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it safely where nature had kept it for millions of years, which is in depleted gas reservoirs beneath the sea.

It is within this paradigm that the need for a systemic redefinition of energy infrastructure and transnational value chains arises. The industrial transition does not end with the decommissioning of fossil-fuel assets; rather, it requires the repurposing of the geological, engineering, and subsurface expertise historically accumulated by the industrial sector to build a global market for carbon-management services. Pilot projects and regional hubs such as the ambitious Ravenna CCS hub in the northern area of the Adriatic sea demonstrate how the conversion of depleted reservoirs and offshore platforms could provide the manufacturing asset of Southern Europe with shared, cross-border storage infrastructure. This multilateral, open-access approach not only addresses climate-compliance requirements, but also reshapes the geopolitical and energy balance of the Mediterranean basin, transforming emissions management from a mere environmental cost into a strategic means for macroeconomic stability and the competitiveness within the Eurozone.

The operation of CCS is, first and foremost, an engineering challenge. CO₂ must be separated from the industrial stream, made suitable for transport, and finally stored in a geological formation capable of retaining it over time. These are three distinct operations, but they are economically inseparable. If capture is too expensive, the process itself loses competitiveness; if a transport network is lacking, industrial facilities remain isolated; and if the subsurface does not offer suitable geological conditions, the entire chain cannot be considered reliable. CCS is an industrial chain that begins with the separation of CO₂ from flue gases, generally through amine-based solvents, and continues with compression and transport to storage sites. The technical challenge lies in the low concentration of CO₂ in industrial streams and in limiting the energy required for solvent regeneration. A concrete example is provided by Ravenna CCS, where Eni and Snam launched the first phase of the project at the Eni facility in Casalborsetti. Approximately 25,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year are captured from a stream with a concentration of around 2.4%, achieving an efficiency of over 90%, with peaks of 96%. The CO₂ can then be transported through pipelines or by ship to hubs capable of aggregating emissions from multiple facilities, potentially making the network transnational. Storage takes place in porous and permeable rock formations, such as sandstones, overlain by an impermeable caprock that prevents upward migration. At depths greater than 800 metres, pressure and temperature can bring CO₂ into a supercritical state, increasing the density of the fluid. At Ravenna, injection takes place at a depth of approximately 3,000 metres in the depleted Porto Corsini Mare Ovest reservoir. The confinement of carbon dioxide is ensured by a combination of several mechanisms: structural and capillary trapping, dissolution into the fluids present in the geological formation, and, over the long term, progressive mineralisation. Safety therefore requires geological characterisation, pressure monitoring, and control of potential CO₂ migration.

This is the starting point for a new industrial geography: CO₂ production sites can be separated from storage sites and connected through shared infrastructure. It is this possibility that transforms CCS from a technology applied to a single facility into a potentially cross-border logistics network, in which ports, pipelines, industrial hubs, and large geological formations can be integrated into a single carbon management system. This model is taking shape in the North Sea, where Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are developing systems in which CO₂ can be collected from multiple countries, transported by sea as well, and directed to offshore storage sites. The Norwegian Northern Lights project represents one of the first examples of this approach, because it transforms storage into a service accessible to different emitters, while physically separating the location of industrial production from the location of CO₂ storage.

The potential scale is now global. According to the Global CCS Institute, in 2025 there were 77 CCS facilities operating worldwide, while another 47 were under construction, and the combined capture capacity of operational and developing projects had reached approximately 513 million tonnes per year. These figures are still far below the amount of CO₂ that would need to be managed to meet international climate targets, but they point to a clear transformation: CCS is moving beyond the scale of single facilities and becoming part of shared infrastructure.

Europe is seeking to build a continental network around this technology. The European Commission has identified industrial carbon management as a component of its decarbonisation strategy and, through the Net-Zero Industry Act, has set a target of at least 50 million tonnes per year of CO₂ injection capacity in the European Union by 2030. The aim is to move beyond a model in which each facility must independently find a solution for its emissions and instead develop shared corridors for capture, transport, and storage. Ravenna represents one of the first cases in the Mediterranean in which a former gas-producing district is being repurposed as infrastructure for CO₂ storage. The second phase of the project aims for a capacity of approximately 4 million tonnes per year by 2030, with the possibility of subsequently expanding to as much as 16 million tonnes. The transformation, therefore, concerns not only the fate of CO₂, but also the very geography of energy infrastructure. Ports can become carbon terminals, gas pipelines can be partially repurposed, depleted reservoirs can be converted into storage sites, and the expertise developed by the hydrocarbon industry can be transferred to subsurface management. The underlying economic principle is that of large-scale energy networks: concentrating flows, reducing unit costs through economies of scale, and separating the location of production from that of the final destination. From this perspective, CO₂ takes on a new industrial function. It is no longer merely an emission to be avoided, but a flow that must be measured, treated, transported, and stored. This transition is what makes CCS relevant beyond European borders. Where large industrial concentrations exist but sufficiently favourable geological formations are lacking, a solution can be developed through cross-border infrastructure. Conversely, where large offshore storage basins are abundant, the advantage may lie in becoming the destination for CO₂ produced elsewhere. The result is a new geography through which industrial capacity and storage capacity become two distinct resources, potentially distributed across different countries and connected by logistical corridors. CCS, therefore, does not merely change the way industry manages its emissions, but it creates the material conditions for the emergence of an international market for the transport and storage of carbon dioxide.

The transition from experimentation to industrial scale, however, changes the very nature of CCS. The 25,000 tonnes per year of Phase 1 of Ravenna CCS represent a demonstration project; Phase 2 aims to reach an injection capacity of 4 million tonnes per year by 2030, with a possible expansion beyond 16 million tonnes. The leap is therefore not merely quantitative: it means transforming a single storage site into infrastructure capable of serving multiple industrial districts. This is the logic behind the CALLISTO project, recognised by the European Union as a Project of Common Interest: a Mediterranean network designed to collect CO₂ through onshore pipelines and maritime transport, connecting the main industrial clusters in Italy and France to Ravenna’s offshore storage system. The project envisages pipeline networks in the Po Valley and in the Fos-Marseille and Rhône Valley industrial districts, as well as coastal terminals for the liquefaction, loading, and unloading of ships.

The consequence is the emergence of a market in which carbon dioxide can cross national borders before being permanently stored. Ravenna would thus become not merely a storage site, but a node within a Mediterranean network, capable of aggregating emissions from different industrial areas and definitively separating the location of production from that of storage. This infrastructural transformation is accompanied by a financial one. CCS requires high upfront investments and returns spread over decades: pipelines, terminals, ships, wells, and platforms must be built before volumes reach the scale necessary for profitability. In this way, storage can become a service sold to industrial emitters—a form of Carbon Storage-as-a-Service in which value no longer lies in extracting the molecule from the subsurface, but in returning it underground under controlled conditions. At this point, the issue is no longer about individual facilities. It is about who will control the infrastructure through which carbon will be collected, transported, and stored on a continental scale.

In conclusion, the challenge of Europe is not to set industry against the environment, but to reconcile productive capacity with decarbonisation objectives. For hard-to-abate sectors, where part of the emissions arises directly from chemical processes and cannot be eliminated through electrification alone, CO₂ capture and storage represent one of the necessary tools for preserving productive capacity, employment, and competitiveness. Ravenna CCS demonstrates this concretely: repurposing existing infrastructure, geological expertise, and energy assets to transform the industrial metabolism rather than simply limiting the presence of industry. Therefore, environmental pragmatism depends on the ability to build a transition grounded in industrial reality. Electrification, renewables, energy efficiency, hydrogen, and CCUS are not mutually exclusive alternatives, but components of a broader strategy to achieve climate neutrality. If Europe succeeds in transforming carbon dioxide management into a new industrial infrastructure, connecting factories, ports, networks, and storage sites, decarbonisation can become a strategic lever rather than a constraint, helping to protect and strengthen the competitiveness of its manufacturing base. As a consequence, the true ambition for 2050 should not be to have downsized European industry, but to have enabled it to continue producing through an industrial model with a fundamentally different metabolism.

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