GHG Daily
2/10/2016
Parliament’s Energy and Climate Change Committee today released a report regarding the future of CCS in the U.K. and calling for the Department of Energy and Climate Change to “devise a new strategy for carbon capture and storage in conjunction with a new gas strategy, taking into account the infrastructure challenge in the future." The report goes on to state that the government "has already interrupted the momentum that had built up over recent years. It must not allow what is left to be lost.”
The report comes months after the U.K. Government in power decided to scrap a £1 billion carbon capture and storage commercialization competition, leaving two large-scale CCS projects with little option but to put their projects on hold.
The U.K. announced on Nov. 25 the official cancellation of the competition, in which two projects remained in the running for £1 billion in funding. According to statements made by government officials since the announcement, the decision was financial and does not reflect a disapproval of the technology.
The U.K. launched the competition in 2012, and a funding decision had been expected in coming months. A week before the CCS competition termination announcement, the U.K. government announced plans to close all unabated coal-fired power plants by 2025, signaling a move to lower-carbon forms of energy. Both CCS project remaining in the competition— Royal Dutch Shell’s Peterhead project in Aberdeenshire, Scotland; and the White Rose CCS Project in Yorkshire, managed by the Capture Power consortium, which would be a new-build coal-fired power plant with CCS — have since been put on hold.
