Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
10/12/12
IN THE U.K.
The U.K.’s Department of Energy and Climate Change this week announced it is committing £20 million ($32 million) to a carbon capture and storage R&D project in Scotland that will involve capturing CO2 from a combined cycle gas turbine. In a speech this week at a conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. Secretary of State for Climate Change Ed Davey said that the money will help fund a 5 MW demonstration plant that will capture up to 95 percent of CO2 emissions from a new-build or retrofit combined cycle gas turbine that will be operational by 2016. “CCS is a key part of our aim to reduce carbon emissions from gas and coal in our future energy mix,” Davey said in his speech. “The U.K. is a leading nation in developing this new technology and the project announced today is another important step to our goal of a cost competitive CCS industry.” The consortium developing the technology includes Howden Global and Doosan Power Systems.
The U.K. power transmission network National Grid announced this week that it will move forward on a drilling assessment of a promising saline aquifer in the North Sea with the industry-backed Energy Technologies Institute. National Grid said the multi-million dollar tests will gauge the CO2 storage potential of the site, which is about 45 miles off the east coast of the U.K. and has the potential to store emissions from multiple power stations and industrial sites clustered in that region. National Grid said it will drill up to two wells to gather data on the site’s storage potential. “We believe we are the first in the U.K. to physically assess a saline site for the storage of carbon dioxide,” Jim Ward, head of CCS at National Grid, said in a statement. “This drilling operation is a major step forward in the development of long term, large-scale CCS clusters of transportation networks and storage facilities in the U.K.”
A U.K. official suggested that the European Union cancel up to 1.8 billion CO2 credits on its Emissions Trading Scheme to help prop up the price of allowances on the financially-strapped market. Earlier this week, U.K. Secretary of State for Climate Change Ed Davey said in a speech that cancelling the credits could help buoy the market in the medium term. “I welcome the recognition from the Commission that the ETS needs to be strengthened. But I believe in order to give the certainty to markets and businesses we need to go further than back-loading,” Davey was quoted as saying by Reuters. The European Commission has recommended delaying the sale of up to 1.2 billion permits over the next three years, a move that could double carbon prices, according to some analyses. However, that plan would allow those withheld permits to be released back into the market after 2016, a move that could also flood the market. Both approaches have seen opposition from coal-reliant nations within the EU such as Poland and the Czech Republic, which have blocked most efforts that could raise the price of the fossil fuel. The price of allowances on the ETS has nosedived to roughly 8 euros per credit, widely seen as not high enough to deter polluters from making reductions in CO2 emissions.
