July 14 (SeeNews) - The EU Commission said that it has selected Bulgaria 's first carbon capture, utilisation and storage project, ANRAV-CCUS, as one of seventeen large-scale clean tech projects which will receive a total of 1.8 billion euro ($1.8 billion) in innovation grants.
The project is being developed by Devnya Cement, part of Germany's HeidelbergCement Group, and Petroceltic Bulgaria, and is being funded from the EU's Innovation Fund after the latest round of applications, the Commission said in a press release earlier this week.
The project will receive an EU grant of 190 million euro, which will also get private financing and will, in its final amount, be among the largest investment projects in Bulgaria in the last few years, Devnya Cement said in a separate statement on Wednesday.
ANRAV-CCUS will link carbon dioxide capture facilities at the Devnya cement plant in northeastern Bulgaria with offshore permanent storage in the depleted Black Sea gas field of Galata, through an onshore and offshore pipeline system, according to a document published by the Commission.
The project, a first in Eastern Europe as a whole, has the potential of becoming a CCUS-cluster for Bulgaria and neighbouring Romania and Greece, thus supporting the Southeast Europe (SEE) region's climate targets to 2030, the Commission noted.
"Compared to the first disbursement round, the funds available have increased by 60%, enabling us to double the number of projects supported. This is a big boost for the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industry in the European Union," the EU executive vice-president Frans Timmermans said.
The selected projects cover energy-intensive industries such as cement, chemicals, hydrogen and fuel refineries and span eight other EU countries, including Germany, Sweden, France and Poland.
The Innovation Fund deploys revenue from the EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS) to provide financial support for the development of low-carbon technologies. Revenue from the ETS scheme is projected to reach 38 billion euro in 2030, based on current carbon prices.
Petroceltic Bulgaria is a unit of publicly traded, Ireland-headquartered oil and gas exploration and production company Petroceltic.
($ = 0.9996 euro)