Finland has something most countries building carbon removal strategies don’t: the infrastructure is already there.
A new paper published in Environmental Research Energy (IOP Publishing) models long-term CDR deployment scenarios for the Finnish energy system. The headline number: up to 8.6 million tonnes of CO₂eq per year removable by 2050 in high-ambition scenarios. For a country of 5.5 million people, that’s a serious contribution to European carbon budgets.
Why Finland’s position is different
The kraft pulp process — used to make paper and cardboard — generates large quantities of biomass-based energy as a byproduct. Finnish mills already burn that biomass to run their operations. The carbon from that combustion currently goes into the atmosphere.
Add carbon capture and storage to that combustion step, and you have BECCS without needing to build an entirely new energy system. The bioenergy infrastructure exists. The industrial sites exist. The energy flows exist. The only addition is capture equipment, compression, transport, and geological storage.
That’s still a significant engineering and capital challenge. But it’s categorically different from building BECCS from scratch on greenfield sites.
VTT Research, Finland’s state-owned technical research centre, assessed in November 2025 that Finland is positioned to achieve carbon neutrality sometime after 2040 and could reach carbon negativity by mid-century. The IOP study provides more granular modelling of what that pathway looks like inside the energy system — how much CDR capacity is needed at what points in time, and what it costs the grid.
The policy infrastructure is moving too
Finland has already proposed a BECCS subsidy scheme. Public consultation on the scheme closed in August 2025. The fact that a BECCS-specific subsidy is under active policy development — not just discussed in academic papers — reflects that Finnish policymakers are treating this as near-term infrastructure investment, not a 2050 aspiration.
The study’s framing question is the right one: how much CDR do you need, when do you need it, and what does it cost the grid? Answering that question requires integrated energy system modelling, not just bottom-up engineering estimates of what individual capture technologies can do.
The Nordic model
Finland’s situation is replicable across the Nordic and Baltic region. Sweden has comparable pulp and paper infrastructure — Stockholm Exergi’s BioCCS project is partly built on the same logic of existing bioenergy flows. Norway has offshore CO₂ storage capacity. The Sleipner and Northern Lights projects already demonstrate geological storage under the North Sea at operational scale.
The question isn’t whether Nordic BECCS is technically feasible. The question is whether the financing structures, regulatory frameworks, and subsidy mechanisms will be in place fast enough to hit the timelines the energy system models say are necessary.
Finland is running that experiment in real time. The IOP study is providing the scorecards.
For forest-rich, industrially-developed countries trying to figure out how CDR fits into their energy systems, Finland’s approach — detailed modelling, existing infrastructure leverage, early policy development — is closer to a template than an outlier.