Ed Davey, the U.K.’s former secretary of state for energy and climate change, has voiced some strong opinions about the current government’s decision to scrap a £1 billion carbon capture and storage commercialization competition. “The Conservatives’ decision to pull the funding was not based on evidence: it was irrational,” the Liberal Democrat said in a Q&A published Wednesday in Global Gas Analytics.
Citing the current high cost of CCS, the Conservative government announced in November that it was pulling the plug on the competition. This left the developers of the two projects remaining in contention, Capture Power and Royal Dutch Shell, with little choice but to mothball their projects. “It is difficult to understand because the evidence, such as we had it, suggested the two pilots could have gone ahead. For these types of investments, the state should work with the private sector to tackle long-term strategic problems,” Davey said in the Q&A.
