Standard content for Members only
To continue reading this article, please login to your Utility Week account, Start 14 day trial or Become a member.
If your organisation already has a corporate membership and you haven’t activated it simply follow the register link below. Check here.
National Grid has successfully completed test drilling of a carbon dioxide storage site in the North Sea in an initiative to deliver "a storage solution for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)".
The electricity and gas company distributor said that early indications are that the undersea site 65 kilometres off the Yorkshire coast is viable for carbon dioxide storage and will be able to hold around 200 million tonnes permanently. This is equivalent to taking ten million cars off the road for 10 years.
It is part of the Don Valley storage work programme funded by an EU grant to advance CCS in Europe.
Peter Boreham, National Grid’s director of European business development said: “Global energy demand is likely to double in the next twenty years and CCS is the only technology that can turn high carbon fuels into genuinely low carbon electricity and keep costs low for consumers.
“Drilling is part of a programme which confirms our confidence that CCS will be a practical part of tomorrow’s energy mix”.
Power stations and industry in the Humber region create about 10% of total UK emissions, according to National Grid, and captured carbon dioxide from this cluster of emitters could be taken in shared pipelines and stored in the North Sea storage site.
Andrew Green, ETI Programme Manager for CCS at the Energy Technologies Institute, said: “This multi-million pound project is helping to demonstrate the volume and impact of storage sites such as this. Successful testing at this site helps provide confidence that power stations and industrial sites will be able to store their CO2 rather than release it into the atmosphere.”
Please login or Register to leave a comment.