‘King Coal’ Richard Budge fires up clean power revolution

The Sunday Times
February 1, 2009

Danny Fortson


A RADICAL plan by mining entrepreneur Richard Budge to build the world’s largest “clean coal” power plant in Yorkshire has been given new life after the European Union said it was considering an immediate €250m (£219m) cash injection to jump-start a project the UK government has refused to support.
Budge’s company, Powerfuel, wants to build a 900MW, low-emission power station fed by the Hatfield colliery, which he reopened in 2007. It would be the first and largest plant equipped with carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which strips CO2 from power-plant exhausts and buries it deep underground in geological formations.
The proposal was thrown into limbo last year when the British government disqualified it from a competition that will award “several hundred million pounds” in public funds that industry says is necessary to build the first plant equipped with the experimental technology.
Last week, however, the EU said the Hatfield project was one of four it was considering for an immediate €250m injection. The cash has been made available under a ¤5 billion economic recovery package unveiled last week.

An EU spokesman said: “We have chosen projects that are mature enough so they can be developed this year. We want to invest quickly to reactivate economic activity.”
Budge, known as King Coal after he bought the British coal industry from the government in the 1990s, will make a detailed proposal to EU officials this week.
He said: “If government policy were in place today, we could start building in April and be saving 5m tonnes of carbon per year by 2014. That’s more than the carbon savings from every wind farm that is built and operating in Britain today.”
Carbon capture and storage technology is seen as critical in combating climate change. The other UK projects named by the EU were Eon’s proposed coal plant at Kingsnorth in Kent, Scottish Power’s Longannet station and RWE’s Tilbury plant.
Whichever receives the EU cash could leapfrog a slow-moving British government competition that will subsidise the first CCS plant in the UK. A winner is not expected to be named until next year.
The Hatfield proposal was disqualified last year after the government decided to limit it to so-called “post-combustion” technology, which “scrubs” the CO2 from the flue gases generated by burning coal or gas.
Budge plans to build a pre-combustion facility, which gasifies coal before it is fed into the power plant and separates out the CO2, which is piped underground. At 900MW the project is much larger than the government’s demonstration competition, which would fund the building of plants about one third of its size.
- GDF-Suez of France has opened parallel discussions with Germany’s RWE, Scottish Power’s Spanish owner Iberdrola, and Vattenfall of Sweden as it seeks to form an alliance to bid for sites to build nuclear reactors in the UK. The French energy group is expected to decide on a partner soon. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority will auction off four sites next month.