When you started the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) research project nearly two years ago, what outcome did you expect it to have?
We had two or three major aims.
The first was to ascertain the main uncertainties about Carbon Capture and Storage technologies. It was less about developing the technologies further and more about taking stock of the current situation. We needed to establish the key legal, social and economic hurdles to CCS.
Secondly, we needed to see what we could learn about those uncertainties from history, by looking back at previous technologies that have something in common with Carbon Capture and Storage.
From this, our objective was to make recommendations to government policy makers and other stakeholders. We can go to developers of this technology, for example, and tell them that if they want to maximise the chances that these technologies will be deployed successfully in a commercial fashion, then these are the steps to pursue.
What benefits does Carbon Capture and Storage have over other carbon-reducing technologies?
In the report we do not say these technologies are better than other methods of reducing carbon emissions. There are many other methods – such as renewables or nuclear – which can potentially be effective in doing this.
We are not trying to say that CCS is necessarily the best technology; however, it does have many advantages. One clear advantage would be that, in principle, you can continue to use fossil fuels in the energy system, whilst reducing carbon emissions at the same time.
To some extent that can be achieved without CCS, but there is a real limit to that.
In your report you say that a regulatory approach to carbon emissions can only work if the technology is well developed, and that the additional cost can be passed on to consumers. How far along has the development of the technology come, and do you think passing on increased costs on costumers is sustainable in the long term?
The technology still has some way to go. The components of CCS currently exist; people are capturing carbon from power plants or other industrial facilities at small scale.
Transportation of CO2 through long-distance pipelines is happening, especially in the USA, and there are several carbon storage demonstrations around the world. These have been injecting CO2 into oil and gas fields for several years. However, all of these elements haven’t been put together and built up to fit a full-scale power plant.
We have some way to go in terms of scaling up and integrating the technology, getting the organisations involved to work together, and finding out what the costs are.
What we learnt from our historical work is that some technologies in the past have been deployed using regulatory approaches, so for example the technology that reduces sulphur emissions was mandated in the USA as far back as the 1970s.
At that stage enough was known about the technology that they thought mandating it would lead to power companies being able to deploy it successfully. We think at the moment CCS is at too early a stage for the government to say ‘all fossil fuel power plants in the UK have to fit this technology by a certain date’.
That would be a very risky policy to adopt, as we do not fully know if these technologies can deliver yet.
There is a process to go through of government supporting the full scale demonstrations, which is what it plans to do. The cost for this will have to be borne by taxpayers or energy consumers, and until we do that, we are really not sure if CCS is a realistic option or not.
As a result we are eager to see this pursued as soon as possible, really to see if it is viable or not.
What are the next steps for CCS technology, and what type of policy is required from the government to ensure that this technology is implemented?
The key next step, which government came out with before Easter, is the re-launched plan to demonstrate the technology at scale in the UK.
The government has published a ‘roadmap’ and re-launched its competition to build demonstration projects, which is something government has tried to do in the UK for five years.
Our view is that we really need to proceed with that, and to determine how these plants work economically and technically.
The money is available for the costs of some of those demonstrations. But government needs to combine that money from grants with that which will be available via the reform of the energy market. If these two things don’t coordinate with each other, I think many of these plants won’t be able to be built. Both elements are important if CCS technologies are to be financially viable.
We also have to make sure that legal issues around storage are resolved.
Although the CCS roadmap which government has released is very welcome, because of all the delays, there is still some scepticism out there about whether the government can really make this work.
I think the government has a lot to do to move from the plan to actually realising a few plants in a few years’ time.
There has been some public opposition to carbon storage around the world. Why do you think people have shown opposition to this technology?
There has been some opposition, particularly in Germany and the Netherlands. In both these countries, their plans were very different to those in the UK.
In Germany and the Netherlands, the plan was to have storage of CO2 under land rather than offshore under the sea bed. Because this is under land, people will naturally start to worry if developers intend to inject CO2 under a certain site. It doesn’t mean to say that these worries are scientifically founded, but such concerns are an unavoidable fact of many energy infrastructure developments.
That has been the major reason for public opposition in those countries. I also detect a fundamental scepticism, in countries such as Germany, about this idea of capturing CO2 from fossil fuel power plants. There is much bigger public support for the idea of moving away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and energy efficiency. My sense is that some of that is also behind the opposition.
The hope for industry in the UK is that by doing offshore storage, they will avoid some of that. However, I don’t think there is any guarantee. Once they start developing actual plants, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some local opposition to CO2 pipelines for example.
We can’t guarantee avoiding opposition here, but we look to be in a better position than some other countries, in principle.
It states in your report that CCS development is a marathon, not a sprint. How long do you plan on pursuing the technology, and at what point will you know whether or not this is the right technology to control carbon emissions?
If you look back in history, again from previous cases, the development of a new technology, from the stage CCS is at to commercial deployment often takes a long time. It can take two or three decades from early-stage research and development in laboratories to deployment in markets.
Of course, we do not have that long now because of climate-change mitigation, so there is a real challenge about compressing that timescale.
Another thing we have learnt from history is that often when you are scaling up technologies, things do not go to plan. As engineers scale up technologies, things often go wrong. They may be longer than anticipated; they may be more costly than anticipated. That is why we have described this as a marathon, not a sprint.
There is a need to keep an eye on the rate of progress and cost. If progress is continuingly slow for a long period of time, and costs are not coming down, then perhaps there is the need to review whether or not CCS is the best use of public money, as opposed to other low-carbon technologies.
Out report includes a call to be aware of the long-term process that is often involved in technology development, and the challenges of compressing it, which is necessary for climate-change mitigation.
The government needs the competence and the people to do this.
What are both the biggest challenges and benefits facing Carbon Capture and Storage technology as the UK looks to find a viable solution to curtailing carbon emissions?
The challenges are definitely scaling up the components that I mentioned earlier. If these components do work at scale, which I think is entirely possible, the key question is how much does that cost, and how much does the price differ from other low-carbon options out there.
The government often talks about running a low-carbon technology race to see which of the options end up getting deployed first, both technically and at the lowest possible cost. There is also, of course, the issue of public acceptance to overcome.
The biggest challenge is ultimately getting the CCS demonstration programme up and running.
In terms of benefits, there is the advantage of having these technologies as part of the solution to the UK’s carbon emissions, and reducing our emissions in the way we need to in order to tackle climate change.
When we are also concerned about issues like energy security, continuing the use of fossil fuels can be an advantage – for example by helping to ensure that we are using a portfolio of energy sources.
Something that government doesn’t talk about as much these days, but used to, is that there is a potential international diplomacy benefit too. If this actually shows that these technologies work and are potentially affordable, then it is easier to demonstrate to other countries – China, the USA, for example – who have a lot of fossil fuels in their energy mix, that here is a way of squaring that with the need to reduce emissions.
There may also be benefits to UK plc in terms of jobs and the supply chain.
We spent a lot of time during the project looking back at history and how technologies worked in the past. Although we can draw some lessons from these successful cases in which uncertainties were overcome, we have to be careful not to take this literally and say, ‘if it happened with this technology 30 years ago, it can happen now’.
Part of the difference is that the UK now has a liberalised energy market. We have private companies developing technology and deploying technology; there is competition out there between electric utilities (though there are suggestions that it could be more effective). People can switch their supplier, etc.
Many examples from the past come from an era when the UK and other countries had one monopoly electricity supplier and we were in a very different situation. We are in a very different world in 2012, as opposed to that of the 1960s, 70s and 80s.
Carbon Capture and Storage: Realising the potential? is released today.