Carbon capture and storage |
Pivotal change in prospects for the UK – and globally
UK government and industry have at last been able to co-ordinate final investment decisions on all of the initial elements for a carbon capture and storage project cluster. Once negotiations for the other Track 1 clusters and anchor projects are completed the next priorities are follow-on activities to exploit the learning from these initial investments – in the UK and across the world
Jon Gibbins Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage, University of Sheffield, UK, and Director of the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre
The UK has finally seen proposals for carbon capture and storage projects reaching maturity at a time when they also meet pressing government policy needs. In the past the relatively slow progress of projects, from conception to completion of the front end engineering design (FEED) studies, and changes in the UK’s energy situation over that time, have led to a mismatch between the CCS offers capable of
FID (final investment decision) and government requirements at the time when support funding decisions needed to be made.
The first example was BP’s offer of an H2 -
fired gas power plant at Peterhead. This was announced at the Exeter Climate Conference in early 2005, at a time when new coal power plants were unthinkable, but needed a government subsidy decision in mid 2007 when,
Douglas
Liverpool
Hamilton North
Lennox Hamilton
Point of Ayr
Liverpool Stanlow Ince Connah’s Quay New CO2 pipeline
Approximate CO2 Liverpool Bay CO2
Existing pipeline repurposed for CO2 pipeline route, transport and storage
project (part of the HyNet cluster). Source: Environmental Statement, Non- Technical Summary, adapted
after a steep increase in natural gas prices, the UK utilities were planning a convoy of new 800 MW supercritical coal plants, leading to climate camps and Greenpeace protesters on the roof of Westminster Hall.
Yet, in 2011, FEED studies, funded by the 1st UK CCS Competition, for post-combustion capture plants on those new supercritical coal plants failed to progress to projects because the recession – even more strongly than the protesters – had made the utilities abandon their plans for new coal capacity.
And finally, in late 2015, the 2nd UK CCS Competition was also cancelled after BEIS had exceeded its agreed electricity Levy Control Framework budget supporting renewables and failed to get additional Treasury funding for CCS. The only credible offer, a second Peterhead FEED study, for a post-combustion capture retrofit with storage in the disused Goldeneye gas field, was deemed poor Value for Money (VfM), partly because of the small scale forced on it by the BEIS competition terms, and also because it was designed with no obvious on-site expansion capability.
After the cancellation of these single source- to-sink projects an alternative model for UK CCS deployment, based on ‘clusters’ of capture projects sharing carbon dioxide transport and storage, was promoted by the UK CCS Research Centre and the Energy Technology Institute [1]
. CO2 pipeline routes for the Northern Endurance Partnership CO2 regions. Source: Northern Endurance Partnership/East Coast Cluster 24 | January/February 2025|
www.modernpowersystems.com transport and
storage project, part of the East Coast Cluster (ECC). The Northern Endurance Partnership project will connect to CO2
producers in both the Humber and Teesside
Virtually all of the UK’s geological storage lies some distance offshore, in the same areas as oil and gas fields, and very significant cost savings can be achieved if this storage, and the pipelines
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