Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
3/20/2015
To take full advantage of the economic and environmental benefits of carbon capture and storage, the United Kingdom should develop 10 GW of CCS capacity no later than 2030, according to a report released this week by the Energy Technologies Institute, a U.K. public-private partnership. “This level of ambition is consistent with DECC’s Electricity Market Reform (EMR) delivery Plan (which included up to 13 GW of CCS by 2030), and with the Committee on Climate Change’s (CCC) scenarios for curbing power sector emissions to 50g CO2/kWh by 2030. Capital investment required would be around £22 – 31 billion to build the sector over the period to 2030, equivalent to around 10 to 12 [percent] of total power sector investment estimated by the Committee on Climate Change. Delaying development of this level of capacity beyond 2030 would expose the UK to substantial cost and deployment risks in meeting carbon budgets,” the report says.
Further, reaching this level of deployment could save the country significant amounts of money, as the report finds that delaying deployment or attempting to decarbonize without CCS will raise the cost of decarbonization in the long run. “ETI’s energy system modelling is based on robust engineering analysis and cost evidence and suggests that successfully deploying CCS would save tens of billions of pounds (up to circa 1 [percent] of GDP by 2050) from the annual cost of meeting UK Climate Change targets, compared with alternative approaches to reducing emissions which do not deploy CCS,” the report says. “Delay in developing a UK CCS sector of around 10 GW scale by 2030 will increase the risks of higher costs in meeting carbon budgets, both before and after 2030. This is because slower development of CCS (e.g. a 5 year delay) would require advancing other potentially more costly and risky ways of cutting emissions (e.g. a substantial move away from gas heating in the 2020s). Avoiding the cost and risks of delay, by investing in 10 GW of CCS by 2030 therefore delivers high value to the UK.”
Demonstration Projects Crucial First Step
The United Kingdom currently has two CCS demonstration projects under development. The White Rose Project is managed by the Capture Power Ltd consortium, made up of British utility Drax, BOC and Alstom, and will be a fully equipped oxy-fuel combustion CCS facility intended to capture 90 percent of carbon dioxide emissions for transport to a storage site beneath the North Sea seabed. Royal Dutch Shell’s Peterhead Project would be the country’s first commercial-scale full-chain gas CCS demonstration project. “The scenarios point clearly to the value of both Commercialisation Programme projects (Peterhead in Scotland and White Rose in Yorkshire) in developing vital transport and storage infrastructure which unlock later unit cost reductions and strategic build out options. Failure to develop two projects to open up two CCS hubs would constrain options and increase the risk of failure to develop a CCS sector at scale by 2030,” the report says.
