£1bn carbon capture and storage scheme scrapped

The Government has announced it is axing its £1 billion competition to develop “carbon capture and storage” technology on power stations.

Nov 25 Britain has scrapped plans to spend up to 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) to help commercialise projects that capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and store them underground, the government said on Wednesday.

“This decision means that the CCS Competition can not proceed on its current basis”.

He added: “Only six months ago, the Government’s manifesto committed £1bn of funding for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)”. Moving the goalposts just at the time when a four-year competition is about to conclude is an appalling way to do business.

Warren said ministers must urgently come up with new plans: “This technology is critical for the UK’s economic, industrial and climate policies”. Instead the decision to pull the plug on the CCS programme, to meet a deeply flawed austerity agenda, is breathtakingly short-sighted, even for this UK Government.

Labour’s shadow energy secretary Lisa Nandy said the announcement was a “huge betrayal” of the communities who could have from the technology.

Jonathan Church, climate and energy lawyer at ClientEarth, said: “This an extremely damaging move by the United Kingdom government”. In choosing to save a relatively small sum of tax payer money in 2015, government is unnecessarily committing vast amount of future energy consumers’ money.

One was backed by Shell and SSE at Peterhead.

Peterhead power station and the White Rose scheme in North Yorkshire were the bidders in the competition. The other called White Rose was based at Drax, the UK’s largest power plant, and was in trouble after Drax said halted investment in September.

It was estimated that around 600 jobs would be created at the height of the construction phase.

“This decision to cut funding for CCS is regrettable and counterproductive”, said Graeme Sweeney, chairman of Zero Emissions Platform, which is a coalition of European companies and organizations supporting support CCS that includes both Shell and Alstom.

“We have worked tirelessly over the last two years to progress our plans for this project”.

The decision to axe the funding, seen as important in tackling global warming, will be viewed as a major blow to United Kingdom credentials just days ahead of the UN climate change summit in Paris.

“It is too early to make any definitive decisions about the future of the White Rose CCS Project”.

“The Committee on Climate Change’s projections and those of Energy Technology Institute are clear – CCS halves the cost of the United Kingdom meeting its binding carbon targets, by decarbonising fossil fuel power generation and energy-intensive industries like those in Teesside”.