The government has been urged to apply the same “commit and review” approach to the deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) as it did for offshore wind.
The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) said the UK should aim to capture and store 10 megatonnes of carbon dioxide per year by 2030 to enable the technology to be scaled up over the following decades.
“To reach net zero the UK must deploy CCUS at a very large scale by 2050 to support the decarbonisation of industry and power, produce clean hydrogen and generate greenhouse gas removals,” the organisation argued in a new report.
“The ten-year period from now until 2030 is a crucial period for CCUS deployment in the UK and needs to lay the foundations which support subsequent rapid increases in CCUS deployment.”
CCSA said the commitment would align the government’s CCS programme with the recommendations of the Committee on Climate Change for meeting net-zero emissions by 2050, assure investors that the market will be of a minimum size over the next decade and send a “strong signal” that the UK intends to become a world leader in CCS technologies. It would also contribute to a green recovery following the coronavirus pandemic and allow the government to make an informed decision on the appropriate level of deployment beyond the end of the current decade.
Fulfilling this commitment would require annual CCS revenues to reach £0.9 billion by 2030 – resulting in an abatement cost of £90 per tonne of carbon dioxide. For comparison, CCSA calculated that scaling up offshore wind to achieve the same level of emissions reduction took almost 20 years and required annual revenues of £2.3 – 2.8 billion.
It said the infrastructure should be deployed in three coastal areas and connected to industrial clusters in Teesside, Humberside, Merseyside and St Fergus: “Establishing CO2 infrastructure sites in the three offshore areas that contain the majority of the UK’s storage capacity – the Central North Sea, East Irish Sea and Southern North Sea – will provide the opportunity for CCUS to be deployed around the UK and within all of the key industrial regions.”
CCSA said this would require an investment of £1.8 billion – more than double the amount the government has committed – and added that the UK “should not seek to create a competition that determines which region have access to CO2 infrastructure and can decarbonise more effectively and which will not.” It said the initial infrastructure should be designed and sized to enable a rapid increase in capacity following 2030.
The association welcomed the support the government has offered so far but noted that the funding is focussed on specific industries or different segments of the value chain: “This fragmented approach creates challenges as the first CO2 capture plants and CO2 infrastructure developed in a region must be progressed in parallel. If there is not the confidence that these projects will move forward together then the risk is that projects cannot be progressed by industry as there would be a material risk that the investment would be wasted if the other element of the CCUS chain failed to materialise.”
In its 2020 budget, the government announced that it would support the deployment of CCS at two sites in the UK – one by the mid-2020s and a second by 2030. CCSA said this staggered approach would delay cost reductions, indicate to investors that the government remains cautious about the technology and risk handing a lead in the field to countries such as the US, China and Norway.