Extracting and using fossil fuels is fundamentally embedded in industrial society. But carbon dioxide emissions from these cause climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification.
Those impacts, and the associated costs, have already started and will be severe. Adverse effects can be reduced by capturing the greenhouse gas rather than emitting it. This is carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The International Energy Agency estimates that 20% of global carbon reductions could come from the use of CCS.
Everybody wants to be there at the finish, but very few nations want to be there at the start.
The UK has persistently stated it has the skills, stamina and finance to lead the CCS development pathway.
This started publicly in 2005-07, when BP proposed CO2 capture at Peterhead power plant with storage at the offshore Miller field.
Scottish Power then designed a CCS project for Longannet power station from 2007-11.
Both bids failed.
The problems from those first two experiences still stand – CCS will cost money and needs a subsidy; CCS is a large and complex project (but well within the range routinely tackled by offshore or onshore industries); participating companies have finite attention spans; and government has to agree to build CCS.
DECC (Department of Energy and Climate Change) has now set itself a CCS procurement competition, with some very detailed homework, and will eventually produce a highly detailed justification for its decisions.
But, to those accustomed to the pace of large industrial operations offshore, the CCS process looks more like kicking a can down the road.
Apparently, everybody is agreed: government says CCS is essential for the future of UK low-carbon electricity, and essential for the legal carbon budget in 2030.
The Energy Technologies Institute says that installing CCS will reduce electricity prices by 20% from 2030, will halve the extra costs of converting the UK to low carbon electricity and heat by 2050, and is the only known solution to decarbonise industrial emissions from refineries, petrochemicals, cement, steel, hydrogen, ammonia, and paper making.
It is not surprising that Parliamentary attention has come to focus on the rate of real progress. On May 21, the Energy and Climate Change Committee published its report on CCS. That makes for deja-vu reading.
On the positive side, our Civil Service has delivered the correct legislation, regulation and Electricity Market Reform rapidly and to the highest quality.
Two full-chain CCS commercialisation projects are being partly funded by the Public Purse through their engineering design.
A partnership, led by Shell, is using 400MW of the SSE gas-fuelled power plant at Peterhead, to take CO2 offshore to the depleted Goldeneye gasfield.
This project will use a known power plant, with a proven CO2 capture system, and with transport offshore through an existing corrosion-resistant pipe to a well understood depleted field, the reservoir of which has three layers of sealing rock above.
The scheme should be operating commercially by late 2018; is very likely to work, and is significant in being the first CCS on a commercial gas-fuelled electricity in the world.
The Drax coal-fuelled power plant – as part of the White Rose CCS project – will build the largest oxygen-combustion plant in the world – to make 450MW electricity from coal and 15% biomass.
But this needs extensive proving, new on- and offshore pipelines and a new offshore storage site.
At All-Energy 2014, commercial operation was stated to be 2023. Very slow. And two projects do not make a new industry.
The climate change committee states that the UK is uniquely well positioned for developing CCS.
It has inventive manufacturers to develop CO2 capture equipment, industries to engineer equipment and pipelines, and a world-leading offshore hydrocarbon industry to undertake safe and secure storage.
The UK should concentrate on developing its massive offshore storage, in depleted oilfields and saltwater aquifers – enough to accept hundreds of years’ worth of our emissions.
About 35% of European storage lies in rocks beneath the North Sea. A future pipeline network can transport CO2 from the Continent for safe storage subsea.
The North Sea oil and gas supply chain has the skills and expertise to build all of that. But it has to be profitable.
So government has to make suitably helpful rules: such as taking ownership of CO2 and accepting long-term liability from storage operators; giving underwritten loan guarantees on operating hours per year; and providing a long-term power purchase price.
All of this has been arranged for new nuclear: why not CCS?
Noteworthy for Scotland is the suitability of more than 20 oilfields for CO2-enhanced oil recovery, and there is a similar number in Norway. This can be technically feasible.
The upside is an extra 3billion barrels of secure, recoverable oil, with the associated tax income which more than pays for CCS projects.
This makes recoverable shale oil beneath the Weald look pitiful. But that needs joined-up government, as the Wood Review pointed out. The climate change committee did not find enough evidence for those connections.
There is no stated ambition from government to encourage or enable income from EU CO2. And there is fragmentation, not co-ordination, between the departments controlling enhanced oil recovery.
To reach the UK’s low-carbon targets for 2030 means another 30 projects like these first two. So that means starting now, not in 2025.
Remarkably, three fully commercial projects still await the UK Government’s allocation of a premium electricity price to kick-start development.
Summit Power’s CCS proposal at Grangemouth could create 5,000 construction jobs from 2015. Transport by pipeline and storage were thoroughly evaluated for the Longannet project. This pipe runs within 10km of 73% of Scotland’s industrial emissions, enabling easy linkage at low cost, a uniquely valuable prize.
2Co Energy’s Don Valley CCS Project in Yorkshire was once a leading European project, and Teesside Low Carbon could decarbonise a large part of the UK chemical industry.
All could transport CO2 offshore to produce additional oil recovery from depleted fields. All are withering due to a lack of government attention.
CCS provides insurance against the 100% certainty of future carbon taxes and climate change impacts. Spending £30 per year for each household, now, to develop CCS is good value.
The UK has lost a decade in talking and form-filling.
Leading on CCS means making funding decisions early in 2015, not finding more excuses to wait.
Avoiding CCS investment may look cheap today, but is storing up high-cost trouble for later.
Stuart Haszeldine is Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage, SCCS Director, University of Edinburgh
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