Carbon capture is a promising way to address climate change. If brought into use right away it could make a significant contribution to meeting targets to cut carbon emissions. So reported the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (Post) at Westminster more than two years ago. Its findings took account of the 2003 energy white paper and many government reports published between then and the Post paper appearing.
Fast-forward to 2007 and Alistair Darling's white paper, published on Wednesday, on securing Britain's energy supplies and combating global warming. Carbon capture, a means by which power stations can reduce carbon emissions while continuing to produce electricity from oil, coal or gas, should have a key role in delivering these twin targets. But not yet. Mr Darling, the Trade and Industry secretary, said the competition to win financial support for a working prototype carbon capture and storage (CCS) power station, announced by Gordon Brown in his last budget, would not be launched until November. This was a delay too far for BP and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), which have abandoned plans for a pioneering "zero-emissions" CCS plant at Peterhead because the revised timetable made it impossible to continue.
The decision is greatly to be regretted, if perhaps not difficult to understand. CCS is a technology whose time should have come before now. For all of the focus on renewables, and the continuing debate about the place of nuclear energy in securing supplies, fossil fuels are likely to remain the source of most of the electricity generated for the foreseeable future. Given the continuing role of conventional power stations in the generating process, it is clear that they must be made as clean and green as possible. There are technological and financial hurdles to clear.
BP and SSE had planned to build a power station that would take natural gas from the North Sea and divide it into hydrogen, which would generate enough electricity to power 750,000 homes, and carbon dioxide, which would be injected back into the sea bed and stored at pressures to make the extraction of additional fossil fuels easier. CCS offers many other potential benefits. Britain could become a world leader in the technology, exporting it to countries such as China which are building power stations at a prodigious rate to fuel economic growth but which also have (bigger) environmental responsibilities to meet.
The European Union has set member states a target that all coal-fired power stations should be fitted with CCS technology by 2020. First, it has to be tried and tested and, to that end, the EU wants up to 12 demonstration projects to be up and running across Europe by 2015, giving five years to determine viability. According to this week's white paper, a UK pilot should be ready between 2011 and 2014.
It is a tight schedule; too tight for BP and SSE because a decision on subsidies or pricing structures to offset the higher costs of producing electricity from CCS would not be taken until the technology had been proved feasible. There are some 10 possible projects still under consideration. A gain for one would be a loss for Peterhead and the wider Scottish economy, given that Peterhead's demise could weaken the case for the proposed Institute for Energy Technologies (encompassing CCS research) being established in Aberdeen. Such is the potential price of frustration brought about by a lack of urgency on the part of government. This has had another unnecessary and avoidable consequence: the early ramping up of tensions between Holyrood and Westminster. Is there any way back for Peterhead? This should be remembered for something more substantial than as a vital project that went up in a puff of smoke.
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