What about Carbon Capture & Storage?

Several Liberal Democrats have asked me about a technology called Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) , where CO2 is buried in the ground, and whether I would support coal-fired power stations if they were fitted with CCS.

There are, I think, at least four problems here.

1) CCS doesn’t really exist yet. Ask any expert in the field (unless they work for the energy companies or the government) and they will tell you that it’s 20 years off, maybe 10 if a wartime effort is put into development. There are some small scale experiments going on, notably in Norway. But they’re not on an industrial scale. At the moment no business has an incentive to scale up industrially because no government is requiring them to and because it would be incredibly expensive.

2) Most environmentalists, me included, are not against the development of CCS. On the contrary, we would like to see the government investing in CCS or forcing energy generators to invest in it. But we are concerned that it will distract attention from the stuff we really need to do, which is energy efficiency and renewables.

3) Even if CCS can be made to work on an industrial scale there’s still the length of time the CO2 has to stay underground – basically forever. If it leaks out then we’re back to square one. In that sense it’s the same problem as nuclear waste. And we know where we are with that – nowhere.

4) The last problem is a moral one. If Britain allows new coal-fired power stations to be built without CCS in place, then we’re setting a terrible example to the rest of the world. How can we complain about China building a new coal-fired power station every week if we’re doing the same?

The risk is that we build a new generation of coal-fired power stations, that CCS takes too long to industrialise or doesn’t work properly, and that it’s then too late to prevent runaway climate change, indeed we’ll have accelerated it because coal fired power stations produce so much CO2.

The Lib Dem Environment spokesman, Steve Webb, is pinning all his hopes on CCS. I think he’s wrong to do so. I say let’s prove CCS works on an industrial scale first - by fitting it to a power station like Kingsnorth from day one. If it works, then we can build new coal-fired power stations and give CCS technology to the developing world.