Britain's first carbon capture and storage plant to be built in Yorkshire

EU funds demonstration project with €180m award to be matched by UK government for 900MW coal-fired power station
Alok Jha and Tim Webb
guardian.co.uk, Friday 16 October 2009 17.36 BST

Britain's first carbon capture and storage demonstration plant will be built at Hatfield in Yorkshire, thanks to a €180m award from the European Union. The funds, announced today, will be matched by the UK government.
The money has been awarded to Powerfuel Power for a 900MW coal-fired electricity plant that could start operating as soon as 2014. The company will use "pre-combustion" CCS technology, which removes carbon dioxide from the coal before it is burned, and then pipes it to be buried in an offshore gas field 100 miles away. Pre-combustion CCS should trap more CO2 than post-combustion techniques.
Other shortlisted CCS projects in the UK, from Scottish Power at Longannet and E.ON at the now-delayed power station at Kingsnorth, will not receive money from the EU fund. But eight other CCS demonstration plants will be subsidised across Germany, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Italy.
"CCS is moving off the drawing board and into practical application. It's a technology that has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere by a vast amount," said Chris Davies, the Liberal Democrat Euro-MP responsible for moving CCS legislation through the European Parliament last year.
Powerfuel wants to build a integrated gas-combined cycle power station at Hatfield. Coal is first gasified to produce carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The former is reacted with water to produce CO2, which is captured, and more hydrogen. The hydrogen can be diverted to a turbine where it can be burned to produce electricity. Alternatively, some of this gas can be bled off to feed hydrogen fuel cells for cars.
Richard Budge, owner of Powerfuel, said he was confident of securing the £2.4bn total funding he would need to build the power stationand expects the project to be completed by the end of 2014. He said that unless more power plants were built, the UK would face a shortfall in electricity capacity by 2016. "We have to do something, otherwise we better all start buying candles."
CCS is widely seen as a critical technology in delivering energy security at the same time as cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It would allow the world's abundant coal reserves to be used to generate electricity but sequester the emissions. However, it has yet to be demonstrated at commercial scale anywhere in the world, a task that will cost billions of pounds.
A spokesperson for the Department for Energy and Climate Change welcomed the Hatfield funding: "The UK is in a strong position on CCS and we expect to be one of the first countries in the world to demonstrate this technology."
Last week E.ON delayed plans to build its own CCS coal plant at Kingsnorth for up to three years, blaming reduced energy demand caused by the recession. The company denied the EU decision had been a factor. "Whether we did or didn't win the funding played no part in the decision to delay Kingsnorth ," said a spokesperson. "We remain a contender in the UK government's CCS competition to build up to four demonstration plants.
In its report the EU said that Hatfield's plan to use pre-combustion CCS was "a highly innovative concept". In addition, the EU was impressed with plans to create a cluster of CCS projects in the area , allowing several projects to share pipeline and storage infrastructure in the Yorkshire and Humberside area.
Yorkshire Liberal Democrat MEP Diana Wallis said: "This announcement should be welcomed as being great news for the region's economy and for combating global climate change. Hopefully, it will the first of many such projects as the idea is to develop a 'Humber Cluster' of CCS projects that within 15 years could curb the emission of up to 70m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere."
The EU wants up to 12 commercial CCS projects to be demonstrated around the continent by 2015. Funding will come from a €1bn economic recovery programme, with additional support of €6bn expected to be announced next year.