The European Union should consider whether to make mandatory the use of an advanced, and highly expensive, technology to capture greenhouse gas emissions from power plants as it seeks to meet ambitious long-term climate targets, the bloc's energy chief has said.

"At the moment we have demonstration projects (...) but maybe in two to three years we'll know much more and then you can say CCS is feasible technically and is a financial investment which can be accepted, and on this basis we can speak about a European regulation for coal and gas power plants in 2030 and 2040," Guenther Oettinger said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.

Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, is key in the EU's long-term climate ambitions because it is the only technology that would allow continued use of fossil fuels like coal and natural gas in producing electricity. Without it, it would be much harder to reach the EU goal of cutting CO2 emissions by at least 80% by 2050 from 1990 levels, especially at a time of growing skepticism about nuclear power.

But the technology is still in a very early development stage and it isn't yet proven to be commercially viable.

Low prices on Europe 's carbon market, the Emissions Trading System, and dim expectations about their level in the coming years are dangerously slowing down the construction of demonstration plants needed to prove that the technology can work on a larger scale.

CCS traps carbon dioxide as power plants or other industrial installations produce it, then the CO2 is carried to a reservoir, such as a depleted oil field, and stored there permanently. It needs huge investments to be developed, and the carbon price is key in triggering those investments. Utilities will be encouraged to invest those billions of euros to install CCS only if they believe that it will be cheaper than buying permits to emit CO2 on the European carbon market. The higher the price, the stronger the incentive to invest in CCS.

Oettinger said however that new rules could be considered even if carbon capture wasn't a fully profitable investment.

The EU is counting on the technology as an integral part of its 2050 climate policy. CCS has a role in each of the scenarios in a recent strategy paper outlining different pathways to reach the 2050 goal produced by Oettinger's department at the commission, the executive arm of the EU.

CCS would be crucial in bringing CO2 emissions in the power sector to almost zero, an unavoidable endeavor if the EU is serious about its long-term climate policy, Oettinger said.

"If you want to reduce CO2 emissions in total by at least 80% (...) the energy sector has to bring near 100% [reduction], so we need a non-carbon energy future," he said.

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