Italy launches first carbon removal network as EU fund stalls

On April 3, 2026, Italy assembled its first dedicated carbon dioxide removal network. The RIRC — Rete Italiana per la Rimozione della CO2 — is not a company, not a fund, and not a government mandate. It is a coordinating body for CDR stakeholders that did not exist before. Eleven days later, on April 14, during Padova Climate Action Week, the network will hold its inaugural public event at the Scuola della Carità. On April 20, a CDR Readiness Assessment Report will land, mapping Italy's actual removal potential against European competitors. What this actually is, stripped of the announcement rhetoric, is a country recognizing that it has been absent from one of the fastest-moving climate technology sectors in Europe — and attempting to move, very late, to catch up.

Italy sits in a striking position on the European carbon removal map. The continent has entered what looks like a commercial phase: Project Greensand in Denmark is approaching operation. Stratos in Texas is entering commercialization in 2026. Skytree, a Dutch DAC company, raised $25.1 million in Series A financing from Division Q, the investment arm of cress grower Koppert Cress, to install capture units at vertical farming operations — suggesting that DAC deployments are now linking into agricultural supply chains. Meanwhile, the EU has established a Carbon Removal Certification Framework covering DACCS, BioCCS, and biochar. Wopke Hoekstra, European Commissioner for Climate, stated: "The European Union is taking decisive action to lead the global effort in carbon removals. By establishing clear, robust voluntary standards, we are not only fostering responsible and climate action within Europe but also setting a global benchmark." Fifty-four projects under the Innovation Fund 2024 Call have signed grant agreements for a total of €2.7 billion, with individual awards ranging from €1.8 million to €216 million across 17 countries and 17 industrial sectors. These projects are expected to prevent approximately 210 million tonnes of CO₂ over their first decade. Italy has none of this. Italy has one operational CDR facility — in Ravenna, run by ENI, capturing CO₂ from industrial emissions. It has research programs (the IGG-CNR is developing mineral carbonation under the EU-funded GECO project). It has not passed a domestic carbon law. On Carbon Gap's policy tracker, Italy is marked red.

Yet Italy possesses the physical and industrial assets for serious CDR deployment. The Carbon Gap analysis, which has now assessed Germany, Finland, Poland, Spain, and Italy, found that Italy has "highly interested and engaged carbon removal players and world-class engineering and manufacturing capabilities, along with established agricultural supply chains, long coastlines, and significant geological storage potential." The Ministry of the Environment and Energy Security has set up a working group to define technical regulation for CO₂ transport networks. An amended CCS law has launched a preparatory study to review existing legislation and develop schemes for CO₂ transport and storage services. The Ravenna facility exists. The coastline exists. The engineering exists. The policy does not. The coordination does not. The RIRC is attempting to build the latter two, privately, without waiting for the former.

Here is what matters about the timing: The EU Innovation Fund, which Startuprad.io describes as "the primary EU instrument for bridging the 'valley of death' — the critical gap between laboratory demonstration and commercial viability that makes or breaks capital-intensive climate technology companies" — is in crisis. The European Court of Auditors published Special Report 11/2026, a full audit of the fund. The headline is stark. After nearly five years of operation, less than 1% of the fund's estimated €40 billion budget has actually reached projects. Of 228 projects originally selected, 40 have been cancelled — roughly one in five. Of 208 projects with signed agreements, 20 have been terminated. In other words, the continent's primary mechanism for moving climate technology from pilot to commercial scale is not just slow; it is actively terminating projects. For an Italian CDR developer with a project idea, the Innovation Fund — the obvious path to scale — is currently a bottleneck. The RIRC is not designed to solve that. It cannot. It is a private network launching into a public funding infrastructure that is seizing up.

The RIRC's structure shows this clearly. The inaugural event on April 14 will announce founding membership, stated capacity targets, and anchor institutions. The watch for these names: Limenet (ocean alkalinity), ENI (Ravenna), and IGG-CNR (mineral carbonation). Any declared government endorsement — a ministry representative, a cabinet-level statement, a commitment to the working group's findings — would materially upgrade the story. None is guaranteed. Government endorsement is not the same as government action. Italy has had a preparatory study, a working group, and an amended CCS law framework in progress. None have moved to implementation. The RIRC is a network of the willing, not a state apparatus.

Who wins from this? The founders of the network — research institutions, industrial players, and project developers who now have a coordinating body and a visible seat at the EU table. When the April 20 readiness assessment drops, Italian developers will have the first quantified map of the country's CO₂ removal potential: geological storage volume, coastline-based ocean alkalinity potential, geothermal-CCUS opportunity. That intelligence is valuable. They also have a named platform to submit Innovation Fund proposals before the April 23 IF25 NZT application deadline — €2.9 billion in available funding, another call, another chance at the bottleneck. Who loses? Italy itself, potentially. Network coordination does not substitute for policy. The country is moving to organize its carbon removal sector while simultaneously having no domestic law defining how carbon removal is priced, certified, or deployed at scale. Italy has world-class engineering and significant geological storage. It has chosen, for five years, not to build the legal or financial infrastructure to use either. The RIRC is an attempt to move without that infrastructure in place. Whether it can actually build infrastructure by networking alone is the real question.

Our read: The RIRC launch is genuine and significant — it marks Italy's first coordinated attempt to enter the carbon removal sector after years of fragmentation. The network will likely produce useful intelligence and will create a named platform for European collaboration and funding applications. But the launch is also a signal that Italy's climate governance remains bifurcated: the country has the physical assets and the engineering talent but not the policy will or the domestic legal scaffolding to move them to scale. The April 20 readiness assessment will be the first real test — if it reveals Italy's removal potential in concrete terms (storage capacity in megatonnes, coastline potential in removal rates, cost curves), and if that triggers government action, the RIRC becomes a predecessor to real policy. If it lands as a report that gets filed, network members proceed with funding applications to Brussels, and nothing changes domestically, the RIRC becomes what much European climate policy currently is: coordination without capacity. Three signals will clarify the actual trajectory: (1) Does the April 20 readiness report include commitment numbers from the Italian government — not just potential, but stated targets and timelines? (2) Do any RIRC member projects successfully fund through the Innovation Fund's IF25 call before April 23, and if so, what are the deployment timelines? (3) Does Italy's government, within 60 days of the readiness report, move to implement the working group's recommendations into actual regulation — or does the preparatory phase extend indefinitely?

Watch for the April 14 inaugural event announcement of founding membership — the names matter more than the rhetoric. Watch for the April 20 readiness report to include quantified storage capacity and removal potential; if it is vague, the network is advisory, not operational. Watch whether any Italian CDR projects successfully secure Innovation Fund financing before the April 23 deadline and what their expected deployment dates are — this will test whether the RIRC's coordination actually moves capital into implementation or simply creates a venue for applications that face the same bottleneck as every other European project. Watch the European Court of Auditors for follow-up investigation into whether the Innovation Fund's termination rate has slowed or accelerated — if it continues at one in five, even a well-coordinated Italian network will face structural barriers to scaling. And watch the PubMed-indexed MOF adsorbent research (Xuan et al., *Analytica Chimica Acta*, 2026) for any Italian shipping companies — operators out of Ravenna, Taranto, or Augusta — announcing pilot agreements with Skytree or other DAC developers. Italy's long coastline and major ports create a natural vector for shipboard carbon capture; if the RIRC catalyzes that, the network moves from coordination to visible deployment.