Because not many people know about it
By Paul Homewood
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h/t Philip Bratby
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Meanwhile, Miliband’s plans to rely on carbon capture fall apart:
Ed Miliband has promised to drastically speed up Britain’s net zero transition but the scale of the task facing the Energy Secretary was laid bare in a damning report from the National Audit Office (NAO), published on Friday.
Officials have told the Energy Secretary that a staggering £630m of taxpayers’ cash has been spent on carbon capture technology which is years away.
Not only did he point out how much investment was at risk, but he also stressed that the government’s main goal of capturing 30m tonnes of CO2 by 2030 was unachievable.
Driving this underperformance is the fact that four keys The carbon capture project is years behind scheduleNAO said, which without identifying untested technology and uncertain costs.
Crucially, it also warns that the £20bn of public money set aside to develop CO2 capture is not enough – and more is needed.
The findings caused a zero-sum nightmare for Labor and Mr Miliband, who secured a cabinet post in the middle It pledged to decarbonise the UK’s energy system by 2030.
According to Labour’s green energy plan, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is expected to remove up to 30m tonnes of CO2 from UK emissions every year by 2030 – and more than 100m tonnes by 2050.
Given its unpredictability, the report warns that the focus on CCS by Mr Miliband’s Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) could be misguided.
The problem is so acute that DESNZ has even struggled to find people to work on its carbon capture program, the NAO found, with more than 50 posts still unfilled.
He said: “DESNZ and the climate change committee describe CCS as ‘essential’ to achieving net zero (but) the Government does not have and is not currently developing a credible alternative pathway without the use of CCS.
“DESNZ has applied the lessons learned from previous failed attempts to launch CCUS. But the challenging nature remains, given the technological aspect.
“And DESNZ’s approach now brings with it new complexities that need to be managed, depending on the parallel and interdependent negotiations of projects across a range of technologies.”
However, in practice, no one has been able to develop a full-scale operating CCS system – partly because of engineering problems but also because of the huge costs.
Scientists estimate that capturing and burying the CO2 produced by a typical gas-fired power station could absorb 20pc of energy production – making it uneconomical.
The NAO report warns: “There are certain risks associated with technology that has not been proven on the scale planned, and relies on specialist expertise and equipment.
“For example, one of the British emitter projects plans to build a gas-fired power stations with carbon capturebut this would be 40 times larger than the existing examples around the world.
“Previous attempts to expand CCS in the US ended before starting operations due to cost overruns due to the large scale from pilot to commercial scale.
“Similarly, the application of CCS in the cement industry cannot be proven at scale, with potential limitations to technical experience.”
Some experts backed Mr Miliband’s determination. Simon Virley, head of energy and natural resources in KPMG’s UK accountancy and consultancy division, said offshore wind has never seemed unviable – but good engineering has made it a success story.
He believes the same can be done with carbon capture and storage.
“We have to make CCS work if we want to get net zero and there is no time to waste,” he said.
“We have experienced two previous failed attempts in the UK, so we need to make it ‘third time lucky’, by learning the lessons of past initiatives and through the Government willing to reduce the risk of early projects, through co-investment through the National Wealth. Fund and GB Energy.
Laith Whitwham, senior policy adviser for industrial transition and CCS at think tank E3G, said previous ministers were to blame for some of the recent setbacks.
He said: “The new government must balance the fact that CCS is expensive with the fact that it is necessary to decarbonise some sectors. The frequent U-turn policies of the last government do not help, promoting development and scale-up that will reduce costs.
“However, there are still economic opportunities, and the new Government must accelerate deployment wherever possible.”
However, scientists warn that the technology still needs a lot of research and engineering to be successful.
The Royal Society, the UK’s leading scientific organization which has produced several reports on CCS, said: “Immense and sustained investment is needed every year until 2050 to build injection wells, transport networks, monitoring technology and a skilled workforce , and install hundreds of new wells every year.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/07/24/how-failure-carbon-capture-risks-net-zero-nightmare-labour
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The suggestion that we should spend more than £20bn on something we don’t know we will do is ridiculous. Let US or EU spend money instead. But fools like Whitwham and Virley still think they can do it when the rest of the world has failed.
And even if there is a way to make CCS commercially viable, it will massively increase electricity costs, as well as increase natural gas consumption, as CCS can use up to 20% of a power plant’s energy production.
Gordon Hughes sums it up perfectly:
Some leading economists take a harder line. Among them is Gordon Hughes, emeritus professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh who spent much of his career working on energy issues for the World Bank.
He stated that by 2023 the UK would generate around 100 terawatt hours of electricity from gas – producing around 36m tonnes of CO2 – with no proven technology to capture more than a fraction of that.
He said: “The target of capturing 20-30m tonnes of CO2 by 2030 is completely and utterly absurd.
“Over the next decade, conventional carbon capture will be much less than experimental technologies. I don’t know what will happen in the 2040s and there is a small chance that CCS will be viable by then, but the history of the last 15 years shows that the chances are very low.”
“To put it bluntly, CCUS is like many plans for net zero – just a series of technically and economically illegible fantasies designed to avoid the reality that reaching that goal may be impossible and will certainly destroy the modern industrial economy.
Instead of wasting £20 billion on CCS research, it should be used to build a fleet of new CCGT plants. All further subsidies for wind and solar farms must be stopped and emissions targets lowered.
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