{"id":2620,"date":"2023-01-30T12:45:41","date_gmt":"2023-01-30T12:45:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/sussexenergygroup\/?p=2620"},"modified":"2024-01-29T13:30:46","modified_gmt":"2024-01-29T13:30:46","slug":"how-carbon-capture-and-storage-was-brought-back-from-the-dead-and-what-happens-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sussex.ac.uk\/sussexenergygroup\/2023\/01\/30\/how-carbon-capture-and-storage-was-brought-back-from-the-dead-and-what-happens-next\/","title":{"rendered":"How carbon capture and storage was brought back from the dead, and what happens next"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Marc Hudson<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is often promoted as a technology that will square circles.  One of those circles, in the United Kingdom, is the political need to \u201clevel up\u201d the industrial left-behind areas of the north (the so-called \u2018red wall\u2019 seats) while also pushing towards a \u201cnet zero\u201d economy by 2050.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The idea, that we can catch and bury carbon emissions while also helping steel, glass, cement and other heavy industry sectors become \u2018zero carbon\u2019 and keep people in jobs is seductive, and has many political backers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Right now, CCS looks to be \u201call systems go\u201d, with Government encouragement for both projects to capture carbon from power plants and factories and in to producehydrogen from natural gas on the East Coast and in the North-West (HyNet). Other projects in Scotland and elsewhere likely to get funding soon. Business models have been developed, contracts \u00ad\u00ad\u00adprepared and final investment decisions being pondered.  If \u2013 and it is a big if \u2013 everything goes as plan, millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide which would otherwise reach the atmosphere and cause our already overheating planet to warm even more will instead be diverted to where they some of them came from originally \u2013oil and gas fields under the North Sea which are now empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK\u2019s current CCS policy, involving a network of pipeline infrastructure connected to multiple industrial plants and then on to offshore storage sites is closely bound up with the approach to decarbonising industry by working through a \u2018cluster\u2019 approach, with \u201czero carbon\u201d clusters helping the UK to achieve \u201cNet Zero by 2050.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what is striking about CCS now being a key mitigation option is the stark contrast with  only a few years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 25th<\/sup> November 2015, six months after the election which the Conservative Party gained power without having to negotiate with the Liberal Democrats, Treasurer George Osborn announced his spending plans.  Rather than headline the fact that a CCS competition, worth a billion pounds, was being cancelled, a press release was \u2018snuck out\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (the main trade body lobbying for CCS) is, like any lobby group, usually quite emollient when disappointed.  On this occasion, they pulled no punches in their press release:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cToday\u2019s announcement that the funding for CCS will be cut is devastating. Only six months ago the Government\u2019s manifesto committed \u00a31 billion of funding for CCS. Moving the goalposts just at the time when a four year competition is about to conclude is an appalling way to do business.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

However, CCS had already had a long and rocky road.  In 2004\/5 Prime Minister Tony Blair had spoken of it approvingly.  Back thent climate concerns were growing and the expectation that coal would continue to be a major part of the UK energy mix. But when BP proposed a CCS scheme in Scotland, Treasury refused to give clarity about whether \u201crenewable obligation certificates\u201d would be offered. BP pulled the plug.  A tempestuous first attempt at a CCS competition saw gas-fired power plants be added to the potential winners, and  public protest about CCS as a \u201cTrojan Horse\u201d to allow the oil and gas industry to keep doing what it does. That competition had petered out in2011, after Treasury abolished a levy designed to fund it, and the last remaining competition entrant gave up.   Meanwhile, European Union funding efforts were going nowhere, the Australian Government had pulled the plug on most of its efforts and demonstration projects in the USA and Canada were beset with time and cost over-runs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even the biggest fans of CCS were doubtful about its future. Lord Oxburgh in his 2016 review admitted in a letter to the relevant minister that \u201c<\/em>after so many false starts I began this study, as I know a number of my colleagues did, quite prepared to advise you to write-off CCS as a part of UK energy policy.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

How it came back<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Exactly three years after the controversial decision by Osborne, the UK government was hosting a major international CCS conference in Edinburgh, and releasing its \u201cDeployment Pathway.\u201d It was also setting in train intensive work on the creation of business models and the regulatory framework for CCS.  How did this dramatic turn-around \u2013 a Lazarus-like revival \u2013 come to pass.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our research suggests that a combination of factors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Internationally, the Paris Agreement had focussed attention on increasing ambition around climate change. There had also been various initiatives such as the \u201cOil and Gas Climate Initiative\u201d of the CEOs of (mostly European) oil companies, lending increased legitimacy to CCS initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The UK government (only a week after cancelling the CCS competition) participated in the COP21 climate conference in Paris, and signed up to reducing emissions in line with a two degree target.  A year later the UK government ratified the Paris Agreement. Instantly, that meant that the existing target \u2013 of 80% reduction in emissions by 2050, adopted in 2008 as part of the Climate Change Act –  came under intense scrutiny. To keep to its share of a global carbon budget, the UK\u2019s ambition would have to be higher, and a \u201cnet zero\u201d by 2050 target was advocated by many. This meant that industries which had previously thought themselves able to be in the 20% of \u201callowed\u201d emission post-2050, had to start looking more intently at their own emissions. Energy efficiencies and changes to processes could only reduce by so much (and at escalating cost). A \u201csystem-wide” solution for capturing emissions from a variety of sources was -so the argument, went – going to be needed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Other previously international pressures were less clear. The EU was still licking its wounds after the failure of the \u201cNER300\u201d scheme to fund the much-vaunted 15 CCS projects, announced in 2009. The US, now looking intently at CCS under Joe Biden, was under the control of the Trump administration, hostile to any climate initiatives whatsoever).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nationally, the Brexit referendum meant not only would the UK have to re-examine its climate policies (e.g. exit from the EU Emissions Trading Scheme), but there was a change of perspective within the Conservative Party to major government spending in support of industrial growth.  Under new Prime Minister Theresa May, the idea of \u201cindustrial strategy\u201d was back on the agenda (she made much of this during her Conservative Party election bid.)  Two departments \u2013 DECC and BIS \u2013 which had previously looked at CCS for industrial decarbonisation, were brought together as \u201cBusiness, Energy and Industrial Strategy\u201d (BEIS).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question of how UK industry could innovate and sustain itself as part of a \u201cGreen Industrial Revolution\u201d began to pre-occupy policy makers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Amidst all this, the proponents of CCS \u2013 including industry, academics and sympathetic civil servants and politicians \u2013 worked hard to combat the argument that CCS was prohibitively expensive and would only \u201cwork\u201d for energy generators.  They kept up a constant tempo of reports, conferences and lobbying. Alongside arguments for a \u201chydrogen economy\u201d (CCS would be needed to capture emissions from creating hydrogen from methane), the main argument they deployed was around saving industries and jobs in the \u201cindustrial heartlands\u201d – especially on the East Coast of England.  It did not hurt that a Conservative, Ben Houchen, became Mayor of the traditionally Labour area of Teesside in 2017. He amplified the arguments of groups like the Teesside Collective that CCS was affordable and necessary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As one interviewee put it to us<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAs MPs are passing through the lobby, we need people to ask questions to their MP, \u201cwhat about our CCS project?\u201d<\/em> And so it becomes much more locally-owned and supported amongst a diversity of people, rather than the few relatively remote technology advocates.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Regardless of the hard work, the CCS lobby needed luck. And it got this the arrival of Claire Perry at BEIS as a minister. She and civil servants launched a \u201cClean Growth Strategy\u201d in October 2017. This strategy was cautiously enthusiastic about CCS (cost flagged as a major factor!). More significantly, she established a \u201cCost Challenge Taskforce\u201d (The more obvious title \u201ccost reduction\u201d had already been used in 2013!).  This taskforce brought together industry and civil servants which is regarded by our interviewees as the crucial moment of collaboration where details were hashed out, and the idea of industrial clusters\u201d really took shape.  (Not everyone looks favourably on the Taskforce \u2013 for a view that it represents naked capture of the policymaking process, see this article<\/a> by Nafeez Ahmed).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was no single factor that brought CCS back.  Its return was not inevitable, but instead we can see it as an example of the importance of dedicated and persistent champions who did a variety of things. They<\/p>\n\n\n\n