Two scrapped carbon capture and storage projects in the United Kingdom have received a total of £29.4 since the cancellation of the program intended to fund them last November. The U.K. announced on Nov. 25, 2016, the official cancellation of its CCS Commercialization competition, effectively forcing the shutdown of the two projects remaining the running, Shell’s Peterhead and Capture Power’s White Rose.
It seems, however, that the government was still on the hook to fund front-end engineering and design studies for the projects, based on an answer by Minister of State for the Department of Energy and Climate Change Andrea Leadsom on Parliament’s question and answer portal. “Since the cancellation of the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Competition, the Department has made the following payments to the bidders under the terms of the Front End Engineering and Design contracts between Government and each bidder,” Leadsom wrote.
Specifically, Shell has received just over £3 million while Capture Power has received roughly £26.4 million. According to The Guardian newspaper, the United Kingdom has spent more than £230 million on CCS since 2011 with no working plants built at this time.
