A head in the sand approach to CCS

Dr Niall Mac Dowell explains his shock and disappointment with government's decision to scrap support for CCS just as the global evidence base for the contribution CCS can make to decarbonisation is flourishing.

After the 21^st Conference of Parties (COP21), the world is poised to make an unprecedented move towards decarbonising the global energy economy. The level of ambition in the Paris Agreement is high, and will require a substantial and near-term shift in our energy and industrial systems.

Set against this comes the recent news that the UK government has cancelled its CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage) commercialisation competition. For the UK to have credibility in its energy policy, it should be aiming to build its strong energy legacy of meaningful actions (such as the 2008 Climate Change Act), rather than empty rhetoric.

Deploying CCS technology is not as simple as building wind turbines or new gas-fired power plants. But it is widely accepted that meeting the UK’s 2050 climate targets without CCS will cost the UK more than £30 billion more than a scenario with CCS.

This makes scrapping the competition not just very odd but reckless, especially as it was scrapped two weeks prior to the end of a three year competition. If the UK government were making this key policy decision based on evidence, surely they should have waited until the evidence was provided?

Instead, one might argue that they took a hasty decision to satisfy near term budgetary constraints, rather than acting in the long-term interest of the country.

Since the scrapping of the CCS competition, I have had conversations with policymakers from other parts of the world, whose reactions have been as shocked and incredulous as my own.

This different is outlook can be demonstrated by contrasting this recent comment of UK Prime Minster David Cameron: “The economics [of CCS] at the moment really aren’t working”; with a response from US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz: “Carbon capture is critical for solving climate change. And it’s working.”

Cameron quotes the cost of CCS as £170/MWh compared with £92.50/MWh for nuclear energy at Hinckley. This is not a completely unreasonable estimate for the first-of-a-kind CCS plants, but misses the key point – these CCS costs were for demonstration plants, not established nuclear technology. The CCS projects would have provided necessary infrastructure for future plants, so would led to reduce costs in the future.

It is disappointing that the UK government’s position, despite evidence from the ETI (Energy Technologies Institute), the CCC (Committee on Climate Change), the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), is to simply not accept CCS. This head in the sand mentality is not indicative of a government ready to provide the kind of leadership that the UK will need to meet its Paris Agreement targets in an affordable way

The UK government’s decision to scrap the CCS competition has discarded a decade of progress in capacity building in the industrial, SME and academic sector – this is a very costly mistake.