DB Cargo plans to transport CO₂ across Europe

Cologne. Bernhard Osburg, CEO of Europe's largest rail transport company DB Cargo since last November, is directing the railway subsidiary into a business area that is still to be developed: "We are ready to transport four million tons of CO₂ per year reliably and across Europe by the early 1930s," he said in a small group on Wednesday in Cologne. “This is a strategically relevant topic for DB Cargo.”

As soon as Germany's largest CO₂ emitters have made an investment decision to capture produced climate gas and store it in the earth's interior, it will only need a ramp-up of three years to be able to transport it by rail to selected storage locations across Europe. The focus of customers are waste incineration plants, cement and lime plants, which together emit eight percent of the greenhouse gases in this country.

This could possibly be a liberating blow for the freight railway subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn. The state-owned company, which has posted losses in the hundreds of millions for years, will no longer be allowed to receive subsidies from its parent company in the future. This is what the EU Commission decided after a lawsuit from competitors. If the company led by Osburg does not comply with the condition, it faces the risk of being broken up, following the example of the French freight railway Fret SNCF.