UK joins global race to develop carbon capture technology

The UK has become the first country in the world to make CCS compulsory for new coal-fired power plants but it still lags behind its competitors in building demonstration plants

Alok Jha, green technology correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 23 April 2009 18.37 BST

The UK's embrace of carbon capture and storage (CCS) propels it into a global race to develop the technology. But while the UK now leads the world in policy - it is the first country in the world to make CCS compulsory for new coal-fired power plants - it still lags behind its competitors when it comes to building the first generation of CCS demonstration power stations.
Many billions of tonnes of coal are certain to be burned in coming decades, and scientists say it is imperative that most of those emissions are buried underground. Those that master CCS technology on a commercial scale stand to gain from a lucrative industrial opportunity. The climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, said that achieveing this could support 50,000 high-tech jobs in the UK by 2030.
But his conservative shadow, Greg Clarke, said government "dithering" had allowed the technology lead to go to the US, China and Germany. "We've known for over a decade now that a third of our generating capacity is going to be turned off during this decade without a remotely adequate plan to replace it with a low carbon alternative.
Stuart Haszledine, an expert in CCS at Edinburgh University, has previously criticised the lack of CCS research effort in the UK - he said just over £6m had been spent on CCS research in the UK in the past decade, compared with $2bn in Canada, and annual spends of around £40m in Norway and several hundreds of millions of dollars in Australia.
But Wednesday's budget allocated £90m for CCS research and yesterday ways were proposed of paying the billions it will cost to build four demonstrations. Haszledine said: "We know where good clusters of power plants will be, and we know where large storage sites are located. If these 'capture corridors' are built, UK CCS will be in a dominant position within the European Union."
Sue Ion, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, said: "It's still early enough for the UK to gain a real foothold in carbon capture and storage technology but only if we get on with it. We learn and become leaders by doing – not by watching others do it from afar."
To date, no CCS trial has in the UK has left the drawing board. In contrast, several overseas projects have already demonstrated the capture of CO2 and others have been burying the gas for many years.
Last year, the Schwarze Pumpe power plant in north Germany became the world's first demonstration of full-chain CCS - incorporating all the steps from capture to transportation to burial. Its operators Vattenfall built a 12MW fossil-fuel-fired boiler from scratch and will bury 100,000 tonnes of CO2 a year 3,000m below the surface of the depleted Altmark gas field.
In June, French energy giant Total's gas-fired power plant at Lacq will start operating the world's first retrofit of a power plant - engineers there have fitted one of the 30MW gas-fired boilers with equipment to trap CO2 and bury it in the nearby Rousse gas field. While still unbuilt, the UK's proposed demonstration will be much larger, at 400MW.
There are at least 20 other projects in construction or planning phases in the United States, China, Norway, Germany, France and Australia.
These include the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia, which aims to trap 1.5m tonnes of CO2 per year by 2012. AEP is also constructing plants in North Dakota and Oklahoma.
In Australia, the ZeroGen project will start in 2012, using pre-combustion technology on a 120MW power plant while the main Chinese CCS plan includes GreenGen, a pre-combustion power plant up to 650MW that could begin working in 2018.
British companies are also building the technology abroad - in Australia, BP is working with Rio Tinto to build a 500MW hydrogen-fueled power plant that would capture and store CO2 under the sea bed after 2014
The European Union has plans for 12 demonstration plants to be in operation within the next decade and has reserved 300m carbon credits from the next stage of the European emissions trading scheme (ETS) to help fund the technology.