The UK government announced an investment of £22 billion last week to subsidise carbon capture and storage initiatives (CCS). As the Guardian reported:
“The policy builds on the previous Conservative government’s plans to establish four CCS “clusters”, where carbon capture would be used to trap some of the CO2 emitted by fossil-fuel burning factories and power plants. Pipelines would then carry the captured gas underground to be stored in depleted oil and gas reservoirs under the North and Irish Seas”.
£22 billion sounds a lot, but it is spread over 25 years, so at less than £1 billion a year it represents only 0.2% of total government expenditure. However, that sum would buy a fair amount of healthcare or indeed build quite a few more wind turbines. So is this a good use of money?
Research suggests this is a highly divisive issue, with “experts” on one side absolutely convinced it is a great idea and an essential part of the UK’s drive towards net zero, or alternatively on the other side convincing-sounding people who see it as driven by the oil firms lobbying. That are sure it will be a huge waste of money that will increase energy prices in the country and do little for emissions.
CCS is supported by the fossil fuel industry as it provides a way of maintaining oil and gas production but reducing emissions related to that production, making it more acceptable. Basically, the carbon dioxide produced by power generation or industrial activity such as steel or cement-making is captured and then “neutralised”, usually by liquefaction, transportation and then storage, usually in rock formations deep under the land or sea. That allows the process to appear cleaner and have fewer associated emissions.
This isn’t new – I have a vague memory of a project in UK government back in the mid-noughties that was looking at innovative options. And ten years ago, CarCarbon Brief website wrote this.
“Avoiding dangerous climate change is still possible but will cost more than twice as much if we don’t have plenty of carbon capture and storage (CCS). That’s what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded earlier this year. If the world is going to avoid dangerous warming then CCS is probably going to play a pretty important role. The executive director of the International Energy Agency Maria van der Hoeven says it is “essential”. Former UK chief scientist David King has called CCS the only hope for mankind”.
Firms including BP plan to build new “low-carbon” gas-fired power stations that will be fitted with carbon capture units. The UK government wants to position the country as a global leader in the race for better CCS, and sees these subsidies as a key part of driving innovation and developing capability.
However, the critics of CCS make several counter arguments. For a start, development and implementation of the technology has not been easy. Boundary Dam power station in Canada, one of the pioneering projects, has been a bit of a disaster economically, and an April 2016 Parliamentary Budget Office report in Canada found that CCS at Boundary Dam doubles the price of electricity. Almost half the captured emissions also end up being released in the atmosphere through the process.
The process of CCS in itself requires considerable amounts of energy (and water in many cases), so more fuel is used to generate the same amount of power available from the process. That increases the amount of fossil fuels extracted in the first place and obviously, increases the cost of the power too. The UK already has some of the most expensive electricity in the developed world, and it does not look like CCS is going to help in this regard. So some critics argue that this will just accelerate the de-industrialisation of the country and make Labour’s push for growth even harder to achieve. Then there are arguments about the effectiveness and safety of the process. Carbon dioxide can escape at various points, and the long-term leakage rate from storage is guesswork really at the moment.
But I come back to that argument about practicality. There are only 45 commercial carbon capture and storage facilities in operation worldwide and there seem to be few examples globally of the process proposed for the UK working properly. And sadly, we’re not good at delivering large capital projects to time and budget in the UK. Let’s not mention HS2, for example, or indeed the delays with Hinkley Point nuclear power station (blame the French for that as well).
I guess the private firms will take most of the risk here – but the UK government needs to make sure it does not get sucked into another interminable money-pit.