Public Accounts Committee report on CCS is full of errors and misconceptions
The role of the UK Parliament Public Accounts Committee (PAC) is to examine the value for money of Government programmes and service delivery. This is a profoundly important role, especially as we see this kind of public scrutiny and transparency being jeopardised elsewhere in the world. It is therefore vital that Parliamentary Committees do not simply “rubber stamp” Government programmes, but equally in order to perform this vital public service the PAC needs to be well informed and have its facts right. It is concerning that its recent report on Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) indicates that, on this topic at least, this is not the case.
The PAC inquiry report (Carbon capture: High degree of uncertainty whether risky investment by Govt will pay off - Committees - UK Parliament) does make a number of useful recommendations regarding the need to update targets for UK carbon capture and storage to achieve future carbon budgets and assessment for value for money of projects going forward. However, it is unfortunate that the headline message in its press release, that the government’s recently announced £21.7bn investment to facilitate large-scale commercial CCS implementation in the UK is high risk because it is an unproven, first-of-a-kind (FOAK) technology, is completely untrue. CCS has been deployed commercially and safely since 1996 in the Norwegian North Sea and across the world, with more than 40 large-scale operations currently in place, which are already successfully storing more than the UK plans to store by 2050. The PAC assertion that Norway’s experience suggests that projects may not capture and store as much carbon as projected flies in the face of the available evidence; the Sleipner North Sea field continues to store CO2 at its design rate of 1Mt pa, as it has for 20 years. Furthermore Northern Lights, the world’s first cross-border CO2 transport and storage facility, has been completed and was ready to receive and store CO2 as of September 2024. The first phase capacity of 1.5 million tons of CO2 per year is already fully booked. This is a major milestone for the global development of a workable business model for CCS.
CCS within the current cluster projects may well be strictly FOAK in the UK, because of government false starts and indecision over the last 20 years, but it is proven technology across the world and we should benefit from that experience and learning to kick-start our own projects, rather than feeling we need to start from scratch and re-evaluate risks – technology is global. The gas power plus CCS technology being used by Net Zero Teesside (NZT) has been deployed many times across the world since the 1990s. Examples include the Entropy project at the Glacier gas plant in Canada; Bellingham MA NGCC-CCU plant (1991-2005); Aliaga, Spain (Gas Engine Exhaust); Verona, Italy (Gas Engine Exhaust); Sao Paolo, Brazil (Gas Engine Exhaust); Les, Spain (Gas Engine Exhaust); Huaneng, Shandong, China (NGCC). The NZT plant is in fact a world first in that it will be the biggest gas + CCS power plant to be built – we are always hearing about how the UK wants to be world-leading in this space and here is a prime example of where we are.
On the financial side, the report criticises the business model for the potential of significant upside to the projects, but fails to recognise that there is a gain share mechanism in the Dispatchable Power Agreement between NZT Power and the Government to avoid exactly this kind of “excessive profit”. On this, the PAC report is simply wrong. In fact the UK’s business models for implementing CCUS are world-leading and are doing much to lower the risks for private investors. Much of the value of the government investment is in enabling an equitable sharing of the business risks. The PAC report questions that the government ‘has not established mechanisms to make sure that taxpayers and consumers will benefit financially should the programme be successful’. What it does not consider is the risk of not facilitating commercial CCUS, without which the decarbonisation of UK industrial processes and provision of low-carbon dispatchable power (for when renewables generation is low or insufficient) would be both vastly more expensive and take decades to achieve if we wait for sufficient renewable and nuclear electricity. The evidence-based investigations of the UK Climate Change Committee, as well as the IPCC and IEAGHG, conclude that CCUS is ‘a necessity not an option’ for achieving net-zero by 2050, or as close to then as possible. The financial benefits to the public will be enormous in terms of new jobs in a CCS industry that will grow to as big as oil and gas has been, and in the preservation of jobs in these high-carbon industries, which would continue to pollute or otherwise go into decline until replacement technologies emerge later in the century.
The report challenges DESNZ to ‘consider the impact of up-to-date scientific understanding of CCUS’, without apparently taking account of significant expert advice to the inquiry on the advances made across the world in the ability of CCUS to safely take CO2 out of the system as an essential tool for meeting carbon mitigation targets. Mention is made of problems with methane emissions from the production of natural gas and LNG but such fugitive emissions can be made minimal by operation of best engineering practice and are no reason not to replace unabated gas power by gas + CCS as the primary mechanism for avoiding the lights going out. The systems are not yet, and never will be, perfect but let not perfection be the enemy of invention on this challenging energy transition journey, where we are already way behind schedule by delaying implementing available but imperfect solutions. The concern that BECCS might not be a viable technology for achieving high volume negative emissions because of concerns that some of the biomass used by Drax may not have met required sustainability standards is no reason to abandon that route; sourcing appropriate low carbon footprint biomass in sufficient quantities is a challenge which needs addressing but meanwhile laying the foundations for BECCS through building the required CCS infrastructure remains a no regrets option.
The report questions why some of the difficult to decarbonise industries like cement are not included in the Track 1 clusters. The aim of the clusters is to provide the backbone transport and storage networks into which other industrial sites can feed CO2 for safe removal. In fact several Energy from Waste facilities (in the Runcorn area for instance) are in well-advanced discussions with the government about contracts for feeding into the Track 1 clusters. As more clusters form and their CO2 transport networks expand, more and more facilities will have access to CO2 storage; connection of the UK’s cement facilities should be a high priority for the next stages.
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 Net Zero Group