Longannet carbon capture project cancelled

A pioneering £1bn state-funded carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at the Longannet power station in Fife has been cancelled, as the government announced that "a decision has been made not to proceed with Longannet but to pursue other projects with the £1bn funding made available by the government."

Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that Longannet, the only remaining project in the government's competition for CCS funding was on the brink of collapse because Scottish Power and its partners, Shell and the National Grid, were concerned about its commercial viability without more public backing ...

Government and industry have been fighting over the financing of the Longannet project for weeks.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) pledged £1bn, but the developers believed £1.5bn from the state was required ...

Gdn  19 Oct 2011    Energy Policy    Is the coalition eco-friendly?    

CCS

Chris Huhne wins £1bn funding for carbon capture technology

The energy secretary, Chris Huhne, has won a battle to secure £1bn from the Treasury to pay for the development of demonstration technology to capture and bury carbon emissions from power plants ...

The original plan was for the UK to have four CCS demos, and there are still doubts about how the rest will be funded.

The coalition had supported the Labour government's plan for four CCS demos but industry insiders had been concerned they would not go for a levy on bills to fund the remaining three because it would end up having to count towards the government expenditure tally. This appears to remain the case ...

Guardian  18 Oct 2011    Is the coalition green?

Oil recovery using carbon dioxide

I want coalition to be the 'greenest government ever'

Huhne drops Severn barrage to invest in wind power

Ambitious plans to harness the power of the Severn estuary to light up one in 20 of the UK's homes are to be abandoned as a result of the Government's attempt to address the nation's deficit.

Chris Huhne, the Secretary of State for Energy, will tomorrow jettison the world's largest tidal energy project, rather than make the taxpayer foot an estimated bill of £10bn to £30bn for the untested technology ...

Mr Huhne, a Liberal Democrat, will also give the go-ahead in principle to nuclear power stations on eight sites in England and Wales near existing reactors, although the issue remains politically contentious for his party ...

Mr Huhne will stress the economic case for investing public funds instead in emerging technologies, such as CCS, that have the potential to be developed and exported, particularly to rapidly developing economies such as China.

"If we are going to be incentivising things, there is only one Severn tidal stream," a source said.

"You can only do it once. There are not the export opportunities there are with carbon capture, solar or wind."

Mr Huhne also believes CCS in particular could be a "huge growth area".

UK research, which leads the world, includes a study into using the North Sea to store unwanted carbon emissions for some 200 years.

Publishing a series of National Policy Statements on energy, ministers hope to "give industry maximum certainty" and prevent sensible proposals falling "victim to unnecessary hold-ups" ...

Independent  17 Oct 2010    Energy Policy    Is the coalition eco-friendly?    Nuclear Power    Tidal Power

Port cuts 'to cost 60,000 green jobs'

• Government drops £60m port upgrades for giant turbines
• Nuclear lobby secures clean-up costs in spending review ...

Funds for the £9bn clean-coal programme, which had been under threat, are understood to be have been secured, although the pilot projects may be delayed.

But the solar feed-in tariff and the renewable heat incentive, subsidising biomass plants and CHP boilers, are likely to be scaled back ...

Guardian  07 Oct 2010

Contesting Austerity    Energy Policy    Is the Coalition Eco-friendly?    Nuclear Power    Rebalancing the Economy

Coal-fired power stations win reprieve

Exclusive: Government's decision to put pollution standards 'on hold' raises possibility of dirtiest coal plants going ahead ...

The coalition is watering down a commitment to tough new environmental emissions standards, raising the possibility of dirty coal-fired power stations such as Kingsnorth going ahead ...

The introduction of an EPS was personally championed by David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg when in opposition; their opposition to Kingsnorth became something of a cause célèbre – and even features in the coalition agreement – but was opposed by energy companies and Tory backbenchers.

The chief executive at one coal-plant operating company warned that the UK's renewable energy technology – which would be used to help new plants meet the target – was too undeveloped to make the EPS feasible ...

Guardian  15 Aug 2010    Climate Chaos    Is the coalition eco friendly?

More opencast mine bids 'likely on greenfield sites'

Corus scopes out plans to build coal mine in south Wales

Glenda Jackson: EPS

Miliband must end coal emissions

Who will pay the bill for closing Britain's £200bn energy gap?

One fact is broadly agreed upon by all parties: in order to meet its climate change obligations and to ensure the lights do not go out, Britain has to spend somewhere in the region of £200bn on new energy production facilities before 2020: on traditional coal and gas-fired power plants, on nuclear and on renewables.

The question is where the money is going to come from. It will not be the public sector – even if we were not headed into a period of extended austerity, the Government would want the privately-owned energy industry to bear the lion's share of the cost of upgrading its infrastructure.

Nor will it be the energy companies – they simply do not have this sort of cash on their balance sheets.

That leaves two possibilities.

Either consumers will have to pay more, through higher bills, in order to provide the energy industry with the capital it needs, or investors will have to come up with necessary cash, through rights issues and other types of fund-raising exercises at the companies in question.

As a leading member of the latter camp, Mr Woodford's message is that he is not prepared to cough up unless Ofgem extracts some money from the former camp too, by taking a less aggressive line on the returns energy companies earn from customers ...

Independent  21 July 2010    Nuclear Power    Rebalancing the Economy

Britain's Nuclear Renaissance in Doubt

China 'leapfrogs US to become biggest energy user'

Plans for Britain's first coal-fired power station equipped with carbon capture technology have been backed by the European Commission.

The commission has recommended that a plant in Hatfield, near Doncaster, should receive £164m of EU funding.

The sum would be matched by a similar sum from the UK government.

If the plan gets the go-ahead it is thought 1,500 jobs will be created by the plant's construction. Work would begin in 2010, for completion in 2015.

The Hatfield scheme was judged as the third best in Europe by the commission.

It beat off rival applications for money from the Longannet coal-fired station in Fife and a proposed new power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent.

BBC NEWS  16 October 2009

The key here lies with the development of ways to generate energy cleanly. And of these, the technology with the most promise is the one that will allow us to continue to burn coal, the world's most abundant fossil fuel, without generating carbon dioxide. That point was stressed by E.On chief Paul Golby last week. He argued that carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes, in which carbon is removed from coal and buried below ground, may prove to be the most important of all forms of clean energy generation. He is right and the government apparently agrees, hence its recent praiseworthy decision to support CCS development.

Coal is a filthy fuel. But the world needs to balance economic vitality and environmental security. To understand what will happen should we fail with CCS, we need look no further than last week's projections report.

Observer 21 June 2009

Getting the green message across

All of Britain's coal-fired power stations, including Drax, the country's largest emitter of carbon, could be forced to close down under radical plans unveiled by government today.

Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is proposing to extend his plans to force companies to fit carbon capture and storage technology (CCS) onto new coal plants – as revealed by the Guardian – to cover a dozen existing coal plants.

The consultation published by his Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) conceded that if this happened "we could expect them to close".

A spokeswoman said that no decision had yet been made. The government could instead decide to allow coal plants still open in 2020 to operate for a limited period or to keep them in reserve to stop the lights going out.

A spokesman for a company operating several coal plants in the UK said that even if Miliband did not carry out his threat and force existing coal plants to fit expensive CCS equipment, any further restrictions on their operation would be likely to result in their closure. It will probably prove too difficult and expensive to fit CCS to plants nearing the end of their lifespan.

Drax is the UK's newest and biggest coal-fired station. The Yorkshire plant, which provides about 8 per cent of Britain's electricity, is technically able to continue to operate into the 2030s. But since it is 40 miles from the coast, transporting captured carbon for storage in the North Sea would be particularly difficult ...

Guardian 17 June 2009

We've got no choice

A public-private project to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions that was abandoned by the Bush administration is being restarted, Steven Chu, the energy secretary, announced Friday ...

Under the project, a coal plant will be built in Mattoon, Ill., that will store nearly all of its emissions underground, where they cannot contribute to global warming ...

The plant would test techniques for converting coal to a gas, capturing pollutants and burning the gas for power. The carbon dioxide would be compressed and pumped into deep soil layers. Monitoring devices would test whether any had escaped into the air.

NYT 12 June 2009

New carbon capture technology is being tested for the first time in the UK on a working coal-fired power station.

A 30-tonne test unit will process 1,000 cubic metres of exhaust gas per hour from Longannet power station in Fife.

Carbon dioxide will be removed using chemicals and turned into a liquid, ready for storage underground.

Energy company ScottishPower wants to test technology which could lead to a full scale carbon capture plant becoming operational by 2014.

The UK government recently gave the go-ahead for a new generation of coal-fired power stations provided they were able to limit their CO2 emissions.

The scientists have focussed on the post-combustion method of carbon capture and storage (CCS) which aims to trap greenhouse emissions after fossil fuels have been burnt.

The plant, developed by Aker Clean Carbon, will enable them to assess the effectiveness of chemicals, known as amines, at removing CO2.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh will join the project, testing three different types of amine solution over the next three months.

ScottishPower chief executive Nick Horler said: "This is the first time that CCS technology has been switched on and working at an operational coal-fired power station in the UK.

"It's a major step forward in delivering the reality of carbon-free fossil fuel electricity generation."

ScottishPower's parent company Iberdrola said the UK would be its global centre of excellence for CCS development, bringing together academics, industry experts and engineers.

A professorship of CCS will be based at Edinburgh University, but other academic institutions will also be involved including Imperial College, London.

Iberdrola Chairman Ignacio Galan said: "We believe that the UK can lead the world with CCS technology, creating new skills, jobs and opportunities for growth.

"There is the potential to create an industry on the same scale as North Sea Oil, and we will invest in Scotland and the UK to help to realise this potential."

The Longannet power station opened in 1969 and is the second largest in the UK.

The station chimney is 183m tall, the second highest free-standing structure in Scotland.

BBC NEWS 29 May 2009

Aker Clean Carbon

It's simple: there should be no new coal burning without 100% carbon capture and storage (CCS) to bury carbon dioxide emissions underground where they cannot influence the climate.

This is a very different matter from Ed Miliband's proposal in the House of Commons today that energy companies must "demonstrate CCS on a substantial proportion of any new coal-fired power station." The figures he has just proposed (400MW of gross capacity) suggest that only around one-quarter to one-fifth of total emissions from a new plant will be captured.

These partly abated coal plants, in other words, would still be much worse than unabated gas plants.

Miliband went on to insist that "when the technology is proven [we will make a] commitment that CCS will be fitted on the entire plant."

So the big "if" about CCS has magically been turned into a "when".

If Miliband is sure that full-scale CCS is viable, two questions arise:

1. Why has he just announced four demonstration projects to test whether it is viable or not?

2. Why not go ahead with full CCS right now? ...

So here's the difficulty for the government.

It will approve a new generation of coal-burning power stations, starting with Kingsnorth in Kent, on the basis that they will one day reduce their emissions by means of a technology that has not yet been demonstrated.

What happens if the CCS demonstrations show that it doesn't work on the scale Miliband envisages, or not, at least, when he predicts?

The only means the government will then have of cutting emissions from the coal-burning plants it approves today is to shut them down, wholly or partially ...

Miliband can make extravagant promises today about retrofitting 100% CCS to all new coal-burning power stations by 2020 and preventing them from operating without it. But he probably won't be in office then, and almost certainly won't be in his current role. Perhaps, as a private citizen, he intends to march into the Kingsnorth power plant and demand that it shuts down, but he can expect to be bludgeoned by the police if he does, just like the rest of us.

The government's announcement, in other words, is cynical and meaningless. It cannot enforce the decision it has just made, and it knows that no one else will. If coal plants go ahead on the condition that their emissions will one day be abated through CCS, the emissions will be a certainty. The abatement will not.

George Monbiot 23 April 2009

Allies against democracy

A new generation of coal-fired power stations equipped for carbon capture and storage has been signalled by Energy Secretary Ed Miliband.

He told MPs up to four of the plants could be built by 2020 enabling the UK "to lead the world" in the technology.

The aim was to keep coal, a cheap fuel, within the UK's energy mix without abandoning climate change commitments ...

Mr Miliband told MPs clean coal had an important role to play in providing the "diverse energy mix" the UK needed alongside nuclear power and renewable sources of energy.

He said the era of "unabated" growth in coal-fired plants was over and that future plants would have to demonstrate they could sustain "substantial" CCS capacity to get planning permission.

Once CCS is proven commercially viable, as the government expects by 2020, all existing plants will have to move to CCS across all their output within five years.

Mr Miliband said Thursday's announcement was a "decisive step" on taking the UK on a "low-carbon path".

"There is no alternative to CCS if we are serious about fighting climate change and retaining a diverse mix of energy sources for our economy," he said ...

The BBC's Environment Analyst Roger Harrabin said each new carbon capture project could cost £1bn.

While the power industry and some environmentalists welcome the strong new commitment to carbon capture, others argue that even coal plants with carbon capture equipment fitted will still produce substantial amounts of greenhouse gases, he added.

Earlier this year the European Commission approved more than £1bn in funding for CCS development at 11 coal-fired stations across Europe, including four in the UK.

BBC NEWS 23 April 2009

Alistair Darling has just thrown away £300m

Carbon dioxide captured from the chimneys of power stations could be safely buried underground for thousands of years without the risk of the greenhouse gas seeping into the atmosphere, a study has found.

The findings will lend weight to the idea of carbon capture and sequestration (CSS) – when carbon dioxide is trapped and then buried – which is being seriously touted as a viable way of reducing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide while still continuing to burn fossil fuels such as oil and coal in power stations.

There are two substantial problems with CCS. The first is how to trap carbon dioxide efficiently in power-station emissions and the second is how to ensure that the underground store of the gas does not leak back into the atmosphere and so exacerbate the greenhouse effect and global warming.

In seeking to answer the second question, scientists looked at natural underground reservoirs of gas. They found that carbon dioxide trapped underground had been stable for possibly millions of years because it dissolves harmlessly in subterranean stores of water which do not appear to have leaked any substantial quantities of the gas back into the atmosphere.

The researchers believe the study shows that it will be possible to inject vast amounts of carbon dioxide from power stations into deep underground reservoirs where it will dissolve in water and remain undisturbed for at least as long as it will take for mankind to completely abandon fossil fuels and generate clean, carbon-neutral electricity ...

The Independent 02 April 2009

'Kingsnorth should be shelved'

Britain's latest coal-fired power station should not be built, according to Lord Stern of Brentford, the economist who led the Government's review into the financial cost of climate change.

Lord Stern called on the Government to halt the planning process and said that the new coal-fired power station proposed for Kingsnorth in Kent cannot be justified until the technology is developed to capture and store its huge carbon dioxide emissions.

It is the first time that the author of the landmark 2006 Stern Review has spoken out against coal power.

Coal is one of the dirtiest fossil fuels in terms of the amount of carbon dioxide release per megawatt of electricity generated. Lord Stern said it was important to send out a message to other countries, notably China, that Britain will not contemplate new coal-fired power stations until carbon capture and storage is proved to work ...

The Independent 31 March 2009

... coal is still the world's major source of electricity, generating 41% of its power supply. Even in the United States, the most technologically advanced nation, almost half its electricity is generated this way. In rapidly developing nations such as India and China, new coal power plants are opened every month. For Hansen, the only solution is the introduction of a carbon tax across the globe. Companies would be taxed by national governments according to their levels of emissions. Any failing to set up such systems would have their exports taxed by the rest of the world. Fossil fuel plants, especially coal plants, would be priced out of existence.

But last week British energy experts warned that a system of carbon taxes had little chance of success, particularly in dealing with coal. "Coal is going to be available as a source of energy for at least another century and countries like China, India and Russia have particularly rich resources," said Mike Stephenson, head of science at the British Geological Survey. "It does not matter what we say in the west about they should do, they will always want to exploit their coal. If it is in the ground, people will always be tempted to use it. The only way round the problem is to make the use of coal safe and environmentally friendly." ...

Observer 15 February 2009

We must make coal-fired energy less toxic

Coal-fired power stations are death factories

A RADICAL plan by mining entrepreneur Richard Budge to build the world’s largest “clean coal” power plant in Yorkshire has been given new life after the European Union said it was considering an immediate €250m (£219m) cash injection to jump-start a project the UK government has refused to support.

Budge’s company, Powerfuel, wants to build a 900MW, low-emission power station fed by the Hatfield colliery, which he reopened in 2007. It would be the first and largest plant equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which strips CO2 from power-plant exhausts and buries it deep underground in geological formations.

The proposal was thrown into limbo last year when the British government disqualified it from a competition that will award “several hundred million pounds” in public funds that industry says is necessary to build the first plant equipped with the experimental technology.

Last week, however, the EU said the Hatfield project was one of four it was considering for an immediate €250m injection. The cash has been made available under a 5 billion economic recovery package unveiled last week ...

Budge, known as King Coal after he bought the British coal industry from the government in the 1990s, will make a detailed proposal to EU officials this week.

He said: “If government policy were in place today, we could start building in April and be saving 5m tonnes of carbon per year by 2014. That’s more than the carbon savings from every wind farm that is built and operating in Britain today.”

Carbon capture and storage technology is seen as critical in combating climate change. The other UK projects named by the EU were Eon’s proposed coal plant at Kingsnorth in Kent, Scottish Power’s Longannet station and RWE’s Tilbury plant.

Whichever receives the EU cash could leapfrog a slow-moving British government competition that will subsidise the first CCS plant in the UK. A winner is not expected to be named until next year.

The Hatfield proposal was disqualified last year after the government decided to limit it to so-called “post-combustion” technology, which “scrubs” the CO2 from the flue gases generated by burning coal or gas.

Budge plans to build a pre-combustion facility, which gasifies coal before it is fed into the power plant and separates out the CO2, which is piped underground. At 900MW the project is much larger than the government’s demonstration competition, which would fund the building of plants about one third of its size ...

Sunday Times 01 February 2009

CO2 Capture Project - FAQs - About CCS: Capture

CCS - The Urgency and the Opportunity

EON Kingsnorth

Quick Guide to Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage

EU Projects on CO2

Fresh doubts have been raised over plans for new coal-fired power plants after the environment regulator said it expects that those not fitted with expensive carbon capture and storage (CCS) equipment in future will have to close.

The government's leading environment adviser, Jonathon Porritt, has also attacked the plan to build up to eight new coal plants, warning they could 'destroy the overall credibility of the government's Climate Change Programme'. 'King Coal' Richard Budge fires up clean power revolution In a statement to The Observer, the Environment Agency said that any coal plants built before CCS was available 'cannot undermine future carbon budgets and targets'. It added: 'This is likely to mean that the station is forced to fit CCS in the future or close.'

The agency does not specify when companies would have to fit the equipment, but a spokesman said it would have to be 'technically proven', and that forecasts for this range from 2020 to 2030.

Observer 29 June 2008

... let me begin by outlining what is known about deep ocean storage.

First, in order to ensure that the injected CO2 has adequate time to mix throughout the deep sea, injection should be at depths greater than 3,500 metres - that is, the depth below which "liquid" CO2 becomes more dense than sea water.

Experiments conducted by Peter Brewer, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, not only confirm that this is the case but also demonstrate that the CO2 injected rapidly reacts with sea water to form a solid clathrate, which is more dense than both liquid CO2 and sea water. Hence, the injected CO2 would end up on the sea floor as a slush. This would gradually dissolve, releasing the CO2 to the surrounding sea water, where it would react with the dissolved carbonate and borate ions to become chemically bound in the form of bicarbonate ion. As the concentration of carbonate and borate ions is small, the neutralisation would take place gradually as the CO2-rich sea water mixed into the surroundings ...

We know enough to say with confidence that deep ocean disposal of CO2 is certainly feasible, but unless small-scale pilot experiments are conducted, information necessary to assess the impact on the macro abyssal biota will remain obscure. The injections could be made from ships equipped for deep sea drilling, and if the CO2 were tagged with radiocarbon, its dispersal away from the sea floor clathrate pile could be sensitively monitored ...

... I sympathise with those who claim that the benthic world is a fragile one. Hence, before we poke it with CO2, we should do our homework. Therefore, I challenge Greenpeace to relax its stand and allow a pilot project to proceed.

· Wallace S Broecker is the Newberry professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, US, and is a scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth observatory.

Guardian 18 June 2008

Britain's most controversial power project, the £1.5bn coal-fired plant at Kingsnorth, faces an uncertain future as a result of a tough greenhouse gas emissions standard that will be proposed by David Cameron next week.

The proposals will make new coal-fired power stations unbuildable unless they incorporate new clean technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). This strips out CO2 and buries it deep underground to prevent global warming.

The policy, which would signal the end of dirty coal power generation in the UK, will be seen as a move to outflank the government on environmental issues. The Conservatives will accuse the government of "dithering" and "timidity" over its plans to curb CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power stations, echoing criticism from industry and academic figures.

The shadow environment minister, Greg Barker, said there would be no future for the current proposals at Kingsnorth, in Medway, Kent, if David Cameron became prime minister. "We will not allow unabated coal to continue but we recognise there is a future for coal in the UK and there is certainly a future for coal in the rest of the world. We would like to see Kingsnorth as a candidate for a CCS trial. That's entirely possible," he said. ...

Guardian 13 June 2008   More on Carbon Capture

A timetable to fit power stations with carbon dioxide capturing technology should be agreed by next year to avoid "dangerous and irreversible" climate change, some of the world's leading scientists will say today.

Britain's Royal Society has joined with science academies from other industrialised nations and five further countries, including China and India, to issue the warning in documents that will set the agenda for climate discussions at the G8 summit in Japan next month.

In a joint statement, the scientists lament the slow progress being made in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and call on industrialised countries to step up their efforts by developing greener housing and transport.

They urge the G8 countries to commit themselves to a timetable of power station upgrades designed to capture CO2 before it is released into the atmosphere.

Emissions of greenhouse gases are currently running at twice that which the Earth can naturally absorb. To stabilise the climate, emissions will have to be halved, the statement says, adding: "Immediate, large-scale mitigation is required." ...

Guardian 10 June 2008

The UK will fall behind the rest of the world in developing one of the key technologies in the fight against climate change because of "incoherence and timidity" by the government, according to a leading expert.

Stuart Haszeldine of the Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage at the University of Edinburgh criticised the government for its "clumsy" handling of a competition intended to foster development of carbon capture and storage (CCS), a technique to reduce the carbon emissions of power stations run on fossil fuels. He said the policy is leaving the UK is behind its international competitors. ...

Several demonstration projects around the world are in planning stages to start trials early next decade. Last year, the British government announced a competition to build the UK's first CCS power plant, which would go on line in 2014.

At the launch, the business secretary, John Hutton, said: "With China alone building an average of two coal-fired power stations every week, the development in the UK of technology to capture and safely store up to 90% of CO2 emissions is critically important." ...

The competition has favoured post-combustion CCS, which involves scrubbing exhaust gas from a power station with chemicals to remove CO2, but experts believe other approaches, such as turning coal into a gas and removing CO2 before it is burned, are also important.

"It's micromanaging it, which is a very Gordon Brown approach," said Haszeldine. ...

Guardian 09 June 2008

Reformed carbon scheme could drive global change

One email, four words and six minutes: that’s how long it took for the government to reverse its energy policy and trash our chances of meeting our climate change targets.

We’ve got our mitts on some government documents which show how a single angry email from E.on destroyed a central pillar of the government’s energy policy in just a few minutes.

E.on, you might remember, is the German company that wants to build the first new coal fired power plant in the UK for 30 years at Kingsnorth in Kent, which will pump out as much CO2 as thirty developing countries combined. The company is the biggest greenhouse gas polluter in the UK and, it seems, holds more sway over government policy than, say, the world’s foremost climate scientist. When E.on says jump, the government jumps.

We’ve known for a while that the government wants new coal, and that it’s been using the myth of “clean coal” (coal with carbon capture) to justify its desire – despite the fact that coal is the most polluting of all fossil fuels, and that the carbon capture technologies don’t actually exist.

In an email to the government – which we got hold of under the Freedom of Information Act - E.on snaps at the government, saying that business minister John Hutton “has no right to withhold approval” of the new plant.

E.on also tells the government not to include carbon capture and storage in their conditions for building the new coal plant.

It took the government just six minutes to reply: “Thanks. I won’t include.” Just like that. (It's a shame the thousands of emails you've sent to John Hutton and Gordon Brown asking them to say no to new coal didn't have the same impact.) ...

Greenpeace 31 January 2008

UK GOVERNMENT ministers were last night accused of killing off a pioneering Scottish green energy project by delaying a vital investment decision.

BP yesterday announced it will "reluctantly" wind up its experimental carbon capture project at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire - because ministers will not decide until next year whether it will win the subsidy it needs to continue.

The project opened in 2005 and aims to isolate the carbon dioxide produced by a natural gas-fired generator plant and pumped into the empty Miller field under the North Sea.

Alan Duncan, the Tory industry spokesman, said BP's decision had been caused by the government's "dithering and delay".

The Scotsman 24 May 2007

[Oddly, the blogs remain, but the original article is no longer available, nor does a search locate it.]

We will continue to need fossil fuels as part of a diverse energy mix for some time to come. But in order to meet our carbon reduction goals, sources such as coal and gas must become cleaner.

And it is in our own vital interests that the technologies necessary to mitigate the emissions from burning fossil fuels are developed and deployed as rapidly as possible – especially as fossil fuel use by emerging economies, such as China and India, is growing rapidly as their economies expand.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an emerging combination of technologies which could reduce emissions from fossil fuel power stations by as much as 90%.

Meeting the Energy Challenge May 2007

A number of projects are underway around the world to capture carbon dioxide emissions and store them underground but the cost of the process remains too high for many industries, an energy conference in Norway has heard.

The International Energy Agency's Kelly Thambimuthu said carbon capture and storage (CCS) is not going to be a "silver bullet" on climate change and is uneconomic in most cases at $30 to $35 a tonne.

Thambimuthu said CCS is currently at its most viable when filtering carbon dioxide from natural gas coming from wells that naturally include high levels of the greenhouse gas.

CCS also shows promise for pumping CO2 into declining oil fields under the seabed to help bring remaining oil reserves to the surface. ...

Last year, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a feasibility report into carbon capture and storage concluding that it showed great promise for the battle to reduce greenhouse emissions but that the price would have to come down if it were to become viable on a wide scale.

carbonpositive 23 June 2006