Carbon capture is only a part of an energy landscape

It was always on the cards that the government would launch a new scheme to encourage the development and commercialisation of carbon capture and storage (CCS). It’s generally accepted by policymakers that CCS is going to be a necessary component of any energy and environment policy for the next decades, and you can hardly trumpet the benefits of what’s currently, let’s face it, a non-existent technology without doing something to help bring it into existence.

The latest competition to develop CCS and build pilot schemes is better thought out than the previous government’s, notably because it doesn’t limit the competition to one particular technology. In the previous scheme, only post-combustion processes, which ‘scrub’ CO₂ out of power station flue gases by passing them through a solvent which dissolves the gas, were considered; this was because it was though more commercially attractive, because it could be retrofitted to existing power stations, especially those fuelled by coal.