Germany Needs Up to 51 Mt CO₂/yr CDR by 2045—Delays Risk Missing Targets
Germany will need to remove 39 to 51 million tonnes of CO₂ per year by 2045 to hit its climate-neutrality target, according to a new study from Fraunhofer ISE, one of Europe’s leading energy research institutes. And the study delivers a blunt warning: delays in building out CO₂ transport and storage infrastructure significantly raise the risk of missing those targets entirely. Why it matters This is one of the first major studies to model CDR ramp-up within the full context of Germany’s energy system, rather than treating carbon removal as a standalone exercise. That distinction is important. CDR technologies need biomass, renewable electricity, and pipelines to move captured CO₂. Modeling them in isolation misses the bottlenecks. Fraunhofer ISE’s work makes those dependencies explicit, and the numbers are large enough to demand serious infrastructure planning starting now. ...