BEIS Committee chair: CCS ‘only a temporary solution’

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is “only a temporary solution” to cutting emissions, the chair of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS) committee has said, after the Climate Assembly UK report highlighted public opposition to the technology.

Presenting the assembly’s report, which was commissioned by six Parliamentary select committees to inform wider policy making on net-zero emissions, Darren Jones MP was pressed on its conclusions on CCS.

More than half (56 per cent) of assembly members disagreed that fossil fuels with CCS should be part of the UK’s generation mix for getting to net zero, dwarfing the 22 per cent who believed that they ought to be.

In a report published last year, under former chair Rachel Reeves, the then committee said it did not believe that the UK’s Paris agreement climate change obligations could be met without using CCS.

But Jones said that the assembly members felt that renewables like wind and solar should be prioritised over CCS, which the government is also backing heavily as the best avenue for decarbonising energy intensive sectors like heavy industry.

He said: “Assembly members felt that it was a way to slow down the action we need to take on other renewable sources of energy, and were concerned about issues such as the leakage and storage of carbon in the use of these technologies.

“We quickly need to understand the capacity of CCS for scaling up and meeting needs, but we should also recognise that we must prioritise an urgent speed-up in the use of clean renewable technologies, and in my view CCS is only a temporary solution.”

Jones also told the Commons that the BEIS committee will be conducting its own “high-level” inquiry into the assembly’s set of recommendations.

He said the two-pronged inquiry will regularly monitor the government’s progress on implementing the assembly’s report while incorporating its wider work, including future energy and climate change inquiries.

Jones said he had been struck on the degree of consensus that the assembly had displayed on many “very difficult issues”, with “clear steers” on a direction of travel for the UK to reach net zero.

“It showed the pragmatic attitude of the British people to get on with taking the actions that are absolutely required of us. I take from this report that people are willing to be led towards a net-zero Britain, but it is now for the government to take action.

“The citizens assembly report shows that these are pragmatic, considered and evidence-based decisions with support from the whole cross-section of the UK. That should give ministers the confidence to take action in line with the recommendations in the report.”