Can carbon capture and storage return to the stage?

Carbon capture and storage was considered dead and buried in 2015 when the government cancelled two pilot schemes, but now Drax has made a dramatic entrance. Jamie Hailstone reports.

To casual observers, carbon capture and storage (CCS) has been in danger of becoming the “Norwegian Blue” of the energy sector over the past few years.

The cancellation of two pilot CCS projects in 2015 and a discernible lack of enthusiasm among ministers at the time seemed to signal the death knell for its future in the UK.

But in the finest Hollywood tradition, it appears that rumours of its demise may have been exaggerated, because last week there were not one, but two interesting announcements for the sector.

In the first, Drax announced plans to trial CCS on one of its three biomass units at its Yorkshire power station. And in the second, energy minister Claire Perry announced that the UK is to lead an international challenge with Saudi Arabia and Mexico to remove carbon from emissions, with £21.5 million of funding for innovative new carbon capture, utilisation and storage technologies.
Speaking to Utility Week, the Energy Technologies Institute’s chief engineer, Andrew Haslett, says he believes there is still good potential for CCS in the UK, because it already has “well-established, reasonably economic and large-scale CO2 storage”, which he adds is arguably among the best in Europe. “We have as good potential as anyone to take CCS to commercialisation,” he says.

The Drax pilot project, he says, will be interesting because the company is already using bioenergy on a large scale. “Most people think of bioenergy with CCS as possibly coming a bit later down the line, when CCS has already been used on fossil fuels, so this makes it quite an exciting project. All of our analysis shows that CCS has a key role in decarbonisation, because of the flexibility that CCS provides.

“I strongly agree with the Committee on Climate Change’s comments on the Clean Growth Strategy that CCS is now a pretty urgent issue, especially if we are to hit some of our later carbon projects.

“In our analysis, both CCS and bioenergy come out as really important to a cost-effective UK low-carbon transition. If you have a combination of both, it halves the cost of meeting UK climate change targets in 2050 because they are both flexible and because CCS and bioenergy gives you the magical negative emissions.

“You could offset up to 50 to 60 million tonnes of emissions with negative emissions from bioenergy and CCS. It would make the cost of reductions elsewhere significantly less.”

Haslett says it would be possible to decarbonise the UK without CCS, but any alternative would be more expensive and may not work as well. “If you don’t have CCS, you need to have bioenergy, because you have to make liquid or gaseous fuels to fill in some things that are really hard to do with electricity, like aviation and shipping. We have looked at other systems without CCS or bioenergy for the UK, and some of them would not solve the problem. You’re talking high costs and extreme difficulty in making it work.”

However, the director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU), Richard Black, says he believes the cost of developing CCS systems is still an issue, rather than the technology itself.

“If you are going to build a CCS power plant, you know the electricity from that plant is going to be significantly more expensive than anything else on the horizon, except perhaps first-generation tidal,” Black tells Utility Week. “It’s a big investment with big infrastructure, so you will need to have the economic confidence that is provided by a deal like the one with Hinkley C power station.

“This has been the big question for CCS for at least a decade now.”

He adds: “For the power sector, it’s not actually something you need to do. You can decarbonise the power sector without CCS. The real use of CCS is if you want to decarbonise industries like cement, where there are no other alternative technologies around yet.

“Our government has not yet got to the stage of considering seriously how to decarbonise industry and therefore they have not seriously started to address the use of CCS.

“To get the existing 2050 target of 80 per cent emission reductions, it implies you might have to go with some CCS. The government is set on a target to net-zero targets and of course, as Drax has said, it may be looking at a case of power sector emissions to be negative. These are big decisions and, as yet, I don’t think the government is seriously considering them.”

Whether more funding or support can be made available, particularly in the current political climate, remains to be seen, but if the UK is serious about decarbonising the energy sector and other industries, then CCS will have a role to play.