Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
8/23/13
National Grid said results from early European Union-funded test drilling indicate that the western North Sea could be an ideal site for sequestering large quantities of CO2 captured in Europe. “Early indications are that the undersea site 65 kilometres off the [United Kingdom’s east] coast is viable for carbon dioxide storage and will be able to hold around 200 million tonnes permanently,” the British electricity transmission and distribution company said in an announcement earlier this month.
National Grid provided little detail about the tests but said the results are significant not only for the United Kingdom—where companies have pitched the idea of carbon capture and storage clusters in the country’s eastern industrial hubs—but for Europe as a whole given that similar storage capacity is “common” throughout the continent. “Within Europe, the U.K. is in a good position to lead on CCS with clusters of industry and power stations that are near to large storage sites like this one in the North Sea,” Peter Boreham, National Grid’s director of European Business Development, said in a statement.
Eastern Industrial Region Maintains Focus
The developers of CCS projects in Britain have long focused on offshore storage in depleted oil and gas fields off the U.K. east coast, but relatively little has been done to date to characterize the region’s CO2 storage capacity in detail. In order to sweeten the deal for developers to come forward with projects, the government has long emphasized the potential for clustering transport and storage infrastructure in the heavily industrial regions of Scotland and eastern England. National Grid has particularly focused its efforts on the Humber region of the eastern U.K., which generates about 10 percent of the country’s emissions. Plans for that hub, though, hit a wall when the country’s Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) passed on funding 2Co Energy’s Don Valley project in the region.
The government is expected to announce up to two federally-funded front-end engineering and design contracts in the coming weeks under its £1 billion ($1.56 billion) CCS commercialization program. DECC listed a natural gas retrofit and a new-build oxy-combustion capture facility as its two “preferred bidders” under that scheme this spring. The latter project, White Rose, is run by an industry consortium that includes National Grid and could eventually link with other projects in the Humber region. The U.K. Parliament is also currently considering comprehensive energy legislation that could dramatically restructure the country’s electricity markets while also incentivizing CCS.
