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Industry experts have slammed the UK government for failing to provide clarity around its next steps for carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc) unexpectedly scrapped its £1 billion competition to help develop the technology late last year, throwing future projects into question.
Speaking at an Energy and Climate Change Committee hearing, CCS Association chief executive, Luke Warren, said: “There has pretty much been radio silence from Decc and from the government in general about the next steps.
“That is probably a response to the fact that this happened quite late in the process. I do not think that there had been a process in government to think about the next steps.”
Programme leader at E3G, Chris Littlecott, told the committee the treatment of the projects was “shabby”. “It reflects very badly on the UK government’s relationship with business and their ability to drive long-term investment,” he said.
Warren insisted CCS is “much more than just about power”. “It is also about energy-intensive industries and finding a way in which those industries can reduce their CO2 emissions,” he said. “CCS is the only technology that can enable you to do that…”
Neil Kenly, director of business investment for Tees Valley Unlimited, said his company’s project to create a CCS equipped industrial zone had been “severely” set back: “We were looking to piggyback on the back of the other two projects so we maintained the dialogue with Decc to try to do that.”
He added: “Without the infrastructure in place, it puts our whole project back two, three, maybe even five years, and increases costs.”
Littlecott warned that there would be a price to pay for delaying the development of CCS, saying: “We have to recognise that CCS is infrastructure, and there seems to be a view going around within parts of government at the moment that we can afford to wait, and we can afford to buy CCS in the future when other people have made it cheaper.
“However … all the significant pieces of cost reduction in the UK are around the access to transport and storage. Having cheaper and better [carbon dioxide] capture technologies would be great …but we can’t afford to wait until the 2030s and then start to think about [carbon dioxide] infrastructure.”
Warren drove home the point later on: “We cannot just wait 10 or 15 years and then suddenly expect to build an industry in a five-year period. The supply chain just will not be able to cope with that.”
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