UK Government pledges £22bn CCS investment

Energy Policy Comment – UK Carbon Capture and Storage

On 4 October the UK Government announced that it has pledged £21.7bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions (CCS) from energy, industry and hydrogen production (see Government pledges nearly £22bn for carbon capture projects - BBC News).  It said the funding, promised over the next 25 years, for carbon capture industrial clusters, the first two of which are located on Merseyside and Teesside, would create thousands of jobs, attract private investment and be essential to the UK meeting its 2050 net-zero climate goals.  The group of eight experienced academics at Imperial, who have been working on developing CCS technologies for over 20 years and been closely engaged in efforts to commercialise CCS and reduce its costs for over 20 years, issued the following energy policy comment welcoming this announcement.

UK Government pledges £22bn investment over 25 years for CCS and hydrogen in northern industrial clusters

The confirmation of £22bn of government funding for CCS announced on 4 October is excellent news for the UK economy, industry, jobs and its ability to achieve our 2050 net-zero emissions commitment. 

Decarbonising the electricity grid through replacing fossil fuel generation by renewables (principally onshore and offshore wind and solar), and complementing this by firm and dispatchable power enabled via gas with CCS is an important element of how we will meet the UK’s net-zero target - we are already well on the way to doing this.  However, decarbonising the foundational industries is also vital. This includes industries which generate CO₂ as a by-product such as cement manufacture, key to the construction industry, and those like steel and chemicals production where, even if they can in time be powered by electricity rather than fossil fuels, there will not be enough spare renewable electricity to do this for decades.  The same is true for hydrogen, where CCS-enabled production of blue hydrogen from natural gas, capturing and storing the CO₂ by-product, will enable decarbonised hydrogen to be used as a clean, non-polluting fuel in the near-term, instead of having to wait for an electrolytic (“green”) hydrogen sector to mature. So, to continue to benefit from a modern built environment and the materials that make up the objects that surround us in our everyday lives that we take for granted, in our homes, offices, cars and the clothes we wear, but without emitting carbon dioxide, CCS is essential for achieving this by 2050 in a way that is just for everyone in our society. However, we are currently far behind the required rate of deployment of CCS in the UK, so the enabling impetus provided by this government support is essential.

Building CCS at scale as part of integrated low-carbon industrial clusters which are central to the government’s plan, initially the East Coast Cluster in the north-east and the HyNet Cluster in the north-west, and later hopefully in Scotland and Humberside, will bring the cost down to levels which are within the noise of normal energy price fluctuations and guarantee jobs and re-skilling in economically deprived areas of the country where much of these difficult to decarbonise industries reside.  On top of this, the CCS industry - which will grow - will eventually provide tens of thousands of jobs as well as preserving those in the industries it is enabling to decarbonise.  Also the UK’s subsurface geology in the North Sea has enough capacity to enable countries without subsea storage facilities to safely store their captured CO₂ and bring additional revenues to the UK.  CCS has had several false starts in the UK since the 1990s, despite being proven on the scale of millions of tonnes of CO₂ per year being injected around the world, so the backing of the Treasury and DESNZ to invest in this key technology is a milestone for a UK decarbonised future. 

This announcement is a win-win situation for the UK achieving its 2050 net-zero commitment in a manner that will be of major benefit to the country’s economy and the well-being of its citizens.

Professor Martin Blunt, Professor of Flow in Porous Media

Professor Paul Fennell, Professor of Clean Energy

Professor Sam Krevor, Professor of Subsurface Carbon Storage

Professor Niall Mac Dowell, Professor of Energy Systems Engineering

Professor Geoffrey Maitland, Professor of Energy Engineering

Professor Ronny Pini, Professor of Multiphase Systems

Professor Nilay Shah, Professor of Process Systems Engineering

Professor Martin Trusler, Professor of Thermophysics

Imperial College London, Transition to Zero Pollution