The ROAD project was designed to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of a large-scale, integrated CCS-chain deployed on power generation. Post-combustion technology was to be applied to separate CO₂ from the flue gases of the new 1069 MWe coal-fired Maasvlakte Power Plant 3 (MPP3) in the harbour area of Rotterdam. From the capture unit, the CO₂ was to be compressed and transported through a pipeline, originally to the P18-A platform in the North Sea to inject CO₂ in the P18-4 gas reservoir. An alternative storage site, the nearshore Q16-Maas, was selected in 2015. Feasibility and FEED studies were performed in the period from 2010 to 2017, when the industrial partners pulled out of the project because of lack of political and financial support for the ROAD project. Capture, transport and storage technology is available and will work; remaining questions can be answered by engineering solutions. The full-scale capture plant can be designed and procured to the standard required to enable FID. Pilot plants have proved very valuable for testing and improving the ROAD capture plant design. In all cases, safe and practical designs to transport and store the CO₂ were developed.

This study provides insight into the feasibility of a CO₂ trunkline from the Netherlands to the Utsira formation in the Norwegian part of the North Sea, which is a large geological storage reservoir for CO₂. The feasibility is investigated in competition with CO₂ storage in onshore and near-offshore sinks in the Netherlands. Least-cost modelling with a MARKAL model in combination with ArcGIS was used to assess the cost-effectiveness of the trunkline as part of a Dutch greenhouse gas emission reduction strategy for the Dutch electricity sector and CO₂ intensive industry. The results show that under the condition that a CO₂ permit price increases from €25 per tCO₂ in 2010 to €60 per tCO₂ in 2030, and remains at this level up to 2050, CO₂ emissions in the Netherlands could reduce with 67% in 2050 compared to 1990, and investment in the Utsira trunkline may be cost-effective from 2020-2030 provided that Belgian and German CO₂ is transported and stored via the Netherlands as well. In this case, by 2050 more than 2.1 GtCO₂ would have been transported from the Netherlands to the Utsira formation. However, if the Utsira trunkline is not used for transportation of CO₂ from Belgium and Germany, it may become cost-effective 10 years later, and less than 1.3 GtCO₂ from the Netherlands would have been stored in the Utsira formation by 2050. On the short term, CO₂ storage in Dutch fields appears more cost-effective than in the Utsira formation, but as yet there are major uncertainties related to the timing and effective exploitation of the Dutch offshore storage opportunities.