George Day gives his view on building the UK carbon capture and storage sector by 2030

24th June 2015

Head of Economic Policy - George Day

Over the past few years the ETI’s work has emphasised how important carbon capture and storage (CCS) is to the UK’s low carbon transition. Our energy system modelling shows that CCS can save tens of billions of pounds (something like 1% of GDP) from the annual costs of low carbon energy by the 2040s: a huge potential saving by any standards. Many people find this surprising, but apart from its role in power generation, CCS can unlock savings by capturing industrial emissions, supporting low carbon gasification applications and delivering  ‘negative emissions’ in combination with bioenergy.

The difficulty is that progress in implementing CCS on the ground has been slow, and sceptics continue to suggest that the UK should wait for others to develop CCS technology. 

Last year we kicked off a project to test whether, and how, the UK could build a CCS sector of significant scale (approx. 10 GW) by 2030.  The aim was to explore and understand the real world challenges to getting a critical mass of capacity on the ground.  To do this we created and explored three alternative scenarios for building the sector by 2030, taking account of real geographies and dependencies, realistic decision timelines and project economics. 

We worked with Element Energy and Poyry to create and analyse the scenarios and timelines, and gained important insights from a steering group with the Crown Estate (Ward Goldthorpe), the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (Luke Warren) and the expert chair from DECC’s Office of Carbon Capture and Storage, Patrick Dixon.

Our analysis  shows that the UK should seek to build 10 GW of CCS capacity by 2030 and that this is feasible and affordable if built upon co-ordinated cluster and hub development.

This capacity could capture around 50 million tonnes of CO2 emissions a year from power and industry by 2030.

Infrastructure is the key and by using the transport and storage infrastructure developed for the  Department of Energy and Climate Change’s two CCS commercialisation projects in Yorkshire and Scotland you can unlock future cost reductions and increase strategic build out options.

Delaying implementation of CCS would increase costs through the need to deploy higher cost alternative technologies to cut emissions, while failing to deploy CCS at all could double the annual cost of carbon abatement from 1 to 2% of GDP by 2050.

Our work  identified three possible scenarios to build a UK CCS sector over the period to 2030,  extending previous modelling-based analysis and building on the Government’s outcome for the CCS Commercialisation Programme.

The scenarios are not recommendations – but we believe all three show that it is feasible and affordable for the UK to develop around 10GW of CCS capacity by 2030.  The costs to consumers or taxpayers look reasonable, and the prospects for cost reduction look good if momentum can be achieved.

The first scenario concentrates on the first two DECC commercialisation programme projects with a dominant role for gas CCS with Southern North Sea storage. The second looks at the possible impact of enhanced oil recovery and the third is based on a network of multiple regional clusters, fuels and capture technologies.

They are all ambitious but we believe they are achievable and affordable.

So the UK has an opportunity to build a CCS sector which can play a vital role in  meeting carbon targets, exploit the UK’s offshore engineering capabilities and help safeguard the future of key energy-intensive industries. But we need progress to continue to be made.

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