Energy Transition Commentary
The importance of international collaboration in accelerating the UK net-zero transition: large-scale deployment of CCS and decarbonisation of heat
Key message:
- International collaboration will be key to fast-tracking the energy transition globally. Although the UK lags behind several other countries in large-scale adoption of non-power decarbonisation technologies, such as CCS and domestic heating, it is world-leading in a number of areas that it can bring to the table in establishing international partnerships with countries to share learnings and best practice:
- For non-EOR CCS projects: State-of-the-art business models which lower business risk and help attract investment where there is no tangible revenue stream.
- Large, well-characterised, subsurface CO2 storage capacity, which can be used for cross-border CO2 transport and storage for other countries which are capturing more and more CO2 but without their own suitable storage facilities.
- World-leading research, for instance on:
- CCS at a number of UK universities, including Edinburgh, Imperial and Sheffield, feeding into the dissemination and knowledge transfer activities of the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre, UKCCSRC.
- Heat decarbonisation, particularly on systems engineering approaches to facilitate decision-making based not just on cost but including key factors such as efficiency, resilience, flexibility and consumer acceptance. The tools and analyses developed by universities such as Oxford, Birmingham and Imperial and organisations such as the Energy Systems Catapult and the UK Energy Research Centre can be deployed to inform decision-making taking full account of local resources, priorities and constraints.
The UK is at the forefront of R&D into CCS and we should partner with countries that have benefited from collaboration with UK universities in this area and gone on to implement commercial CCS facilities way ahead of us. For instance, Qatar Petroleum (now Qatar Energy) and the Qatar Foundation collaborated with Shell to fund the 70M USD Qatar Carbonates and Carbon Storage Research Centre pumps[1] (QCCSRC) at Imperial College London over ten years from 2008-2018 to produce ground-breaking research for optimising safe storage of CO2 in the carbonate oil and gas reservoirs and deep saline aquifers common in the Middle East and other regions of the world. Based on this research, Qatar Energy has built CCS facilities (starting operations in 2019) already capturing 2.2Mt CO2 pa, with plans to reach 10Mt pa by 2030. This is linked to ambitious plans to use much of its large natural gas supplies to produce blue hydrogen for both domestic use to decarbonise industry and also to create a large export market comparable to that which Qatar has created for LNG.
During his State Visit to the UK in December, HH Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, Amir of Qatar, spoke (as did King Charles) of the high value of strategic research collaborations such as QCCSRC to both countries. Having supplied the underpinning research, the UK should exploit the close ties between the countries to use Qatar’s expertise in fast-tracking CCS from concept to large-scale deployment in just a few years, as a springboard to accelerate reaching the key targets of 20-30Mt CO2 pa stored by 2030 and 50Mt by 2035. Bringing on-stream transport and storage capacity as soon as possible is crucial to making the UK’s 78Gt offshore subsurface storage capability available to take advantage of cross-border CCS for those countries which are well advanced with CO2 capture but lacking in available secure sinks within which to store it.
Collaboration across the energy spectrum will be key to accelerating the transition to net-zero in the UK. In addition to decarbonisation of power and industrial processes, critical decisions need to be made about heating, with much debate about the pros and cons of heat pumps, hydrogen and to some extent district heating. The UK does not need to re-invent the wheel here. Much of the development work and exploration of business models and policy incentives has been done by other countries and, by piggy-backing on their experience, the UK can inform and de-risk its evidence-based decision making and accelerate the transition to decarbonised heating. It can use the experience of others that the most appropriate technology will probably be region dependent, so a single solution will most likely not be fit for purpose and complementary technologies will need to be implemented in parallel.
As an example of such potential for international knowledge dissemination, over 60% of buildings in Norway are fitted with heat pumps[2] and Denmark has been using District Heating Networks for decades[3], with information on the technology and policy drivers adopted widely available for the rest of the world to learn from. This is why the new Green Partnership with Norway[4] makes enormous sense, and emphasises that in mitigating climate change we are all in this together!
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
[1] Qatar Carbonate and Carbon Storage Research Centre | Research groups | Imperial College London
[3] Lessons from Denmark's thriving district heating sector · IES District Heating in Denmark, Efficient & Clean Energy | DBDH
[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-and-norway-join-forces-to-seize-green-industrial-opportunities