Carbon capture and storage is critical if the UK’s to deliver on its climate promises, and it’s not too late to ensure that it’s part of the mix.
Failure to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) now is bad for business, bad for the environment, and could make it more expensive to meet our carbon reduction targets in the years ahead, a new report has claimed.
Published today (10th Feb 2016) by the cross party energy and climate change committee, the report (entitled The Future of carbon capture and storage in the UK) is a reaction to the UK government’s recent withdrawal of support for CCS technology. In November 2015, it scrapped £1bn funding for a commercialisation competition – leading to the cancellation of significant demonstrator projects in Yorkshire (White Rose) and Aberdeenshire (Peterhead).
The removal of this support left many – us included – scratching their heads and pondering the commercial sense of strangling off an emerging area of technical expertise considered by many to be essential if we are to meet the carbon reduction targets agreed in Paris last year.
Today’s report, put together by a committee half of whose members are Tory MPs, goes further in its criticism and calls on the government to urgently devise a new CCS strategy.
The report argues that with gas at the heart of the UK’s emissions reduction plans CCS deployment is going to become essential and that in order for it to have an impact work must begin now on the infrastructure.
“Government cannot afford to sit back and simply wait and see if CCS will be deployed when it is needed,” said committee chair Angus MacNeil MP. “Getting the infrastructure in place takes time and the Government needs to ensure that we can start fitting gas fired power stations with carbon capture and storage technology in the 2020s.”
Commenting on the report, Prof Jim Watson Director of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC), added that without CCS gas-demand is going to have to fall sharply from the mid 2020s if we’re to meet emissions targets. Watson also warned that the UK is in danger of surrendering a technical lead that it will one day have to buy in from overseas at far greater cost.
“In the absence of a new plan for CCS, the UK is effectively outsourcing demonstration and commercialisation to other countries,” he said. “Whilst the UK cannot be a leader in all technologies, this was the only significant large-scale demonstration programme in the EU.”
It seems that with CCS, as with so many other areas of technology, a shortsighted desire to cut costs could come back to haunt us in the long term. What’s more, the government’s snap decision to cut investment in a technology that it had hitherto supported wholeheartedly does little to encourage investor confidence in the UK’s energy sector.
CCS is quite rightly being scrapped because it is grotesquely inefficient and uneconomical which was pretty much clear from the start. It would not have ever started without the gullible politicos who were prepared to believe the snake oil salesmen.
Absolutely. no one anywhere in the world has been able to produce a viable, both technical and economic, system. All green schemes always cost more than they generate. They only make profit in their eyers by including externalities. In Australia they have as an example Tim Flannery, who forced gullible politicians to build mothballed desalination plants as well CCS systems. All there predictions have been proved wrong. We will soon have no coal powered electricity in this country caused by the huge subsidies required for Green energy.
I find myself continuously coming back to the same conclusion. That our political leaders (if they are) are almost totally unsuited to make any technical decision. I used to joke to students that “had I been tasked with creating some fictional company which had everything wrong with it: for the purposes of some management ‘game'” -I would have needed to look no further that one of my previous employers. Somewhat like the grocers’daughter’s decisions (it will take UKplc 100 years to recover-J K Galbraith) such appears to be endemic when our betters (if they are) acts and claims to be ‘Right!’ From technology, through social awareness to the content of teaching and syllabus, I believe it is time we told ‘them’ to mind their own business.
At the end of the day its a cost / benefit exercise.
G.O. felt the cost outweighed the benefit. In an environment of massive public debt, which could threaten Britain’s economy significantly; the treasury has to count every penny. Presumably the projected ROCE was to low.
I’d like to have seen it taken forward but if we use the money to develop modular nuclear reactors then I’m for it, probably more export and sales opportunities.
CCS is a misnomer – it should be named OCS – Oxygen Capture and Storage. One carbon atom (usually obtained from an underground hydrocarbon reservoir) captures two oxygen atoms (usually taken from the air by way of combustion), is compressed (usually by way of capturing more oxygen with carbon through combustion), and is injected back underground. So this can accomplish sequestering 2.7 tonnes of oxygen for every tonne of carbon.
True CCS would be something like terra preta made from biochar produced with biomass energy in which case one tonne of carbon is sequestered for every tonne of carbon –
The country seems damned somehow, by the “leaders” we finish up with. Are we forever to be governed by people with a mind-set of Victorian standards, when to be “in trade” was to be socially inferior, but living off the work of these “lower classes” was the only intro into society. Coming into the real world from university and straight into a political world, what hope is there of their relating in any way to engineering. I’ve nothing against millionaires per se–just having governments who seem to work more in the manner of pulling various levers and waiting to see what happens–“whoops, wrong one again!”
Well stated Bill and Brian
Taking the gross inefficiency of CCS together with the steady global temperatures in spite of rising CO2 levels the government took the right decision.
The money should be spent on removing the harmful emissions from burning fossil fuel such as NOx, SOx and fine particulates.
Best regards
Roger
Bill Church is absolutely correct in his assessment. Sometimes hard decisions have to be made and this hard decision looks to be a correct one.
Unless you guys can come up with something clean and cheap soon, it’s going to be a nuclear future.
Or keep our coal burning stations open and mine the coal (we still have plenty). Current CO2 is about 400ppm. In the Cretaceous period – not exactly short of greenery and the animals to eat it and them – it was, according to some estimates, 4,000ppm and nice and snug.
Except that those animals and plants had evolved to thrive under those conditions. When the climate changed after the K-T event, most of them died pretty quickly.