Tuesday, 11 August 2026

Explosive charges are being used by the Romanian Navy on the bed of the Danube to preserve cooling water flow toward the Cernavodă Nuclear Power Plant, an intervention driven by a drought that has drained rivers across Europe, according to Inside Climate News.

Unit 1 at the plant was taken offline last week by operator Nuclearelectrica after Danube water levels fell, Inside Climate News reported.

Dutch officials disclosed record-low readings last week on the Rhine, described by Inside Climate News as Europe's third largest river.

The Po River Basin Authority in Italy said in a Thursday report that 101 municipalities were exposed to medium-to-high threats to their drinking water supplies, and that tanker trucks were already delivering water to 24 of them.

The European Union's Global Drought Observatory puts the duration of drought conditions at seven months across large portions of central Europe.

World Weather Attribution found the severity of current conditions is roughly five times more likely than it would be in a climate 1.4 degrees Celsius cooler.

The EU Joint Research Centre forecasts severely drier than average conditions over large areas of Europe through September 2026.

Air Products has dropped its Louisiana Clean Energy Complex, a major blue hydrogen project, telling IEEFA it walked away because expected financial returns did not meet its "stringent return criteria".

According to IEEFA, its 2025 analysis estimated the Louisiana project could have claimed up to USD 6.3 billion under the federal 45Q tax credit even if it delivered no net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Blue hydrogen is produced from natural gas, with carbon capture and storage (CCS) used to capture some of the resulting emissions.

Cancellations outpaced commitments across Europe last year. IEEFA reports that 5.4 million tonnes of proposed annual capture capacity was scrapped in 2025, against 4.2 million tonnes of projects that reached final investment decision. Blue hydrogen made up 71% of the cancelled volume.

Operating performance at the largest commercial CCS plant reinforces the cost problem. Chevron's Gorgon LNG facility in Western Australia stored only 25% of the CO2 removed from its reservoir, one third of its annual target, according to IEEFA. IEEFA calculated an effective cost of AUD 265 per tonne captured, against the project's original estimate of AUD 70.

Storage integrity has also failed in the field. IEEFA cites a monitoring-well casing failure in Illinois caused by corrosion, which allowed 8,000 tonnes of CO2 to leak.

Subsidy exposure runs alongside the technical record. More than GBP 50 billion in subsidies has been earmarked for projects accounting for only 8% of the 2050 CCS target, IEEFA estimates, with about three quarters of that financed through levies on electricity consumers.