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October 5, 2024 - 1:00pm
You might have expected that most green-inclined scientists and campaigners would have welcomed Friday’s announcement by the Government concerning carbon capture sites. Labour plans to invest almost £22 billion – of which £8 billion is to come from the private sector – to build two projects to “capture” carbon dioxide and bury it beneath the seabed, one based on Teesside, the other in Liverpool Bay.
If so, you would be wrong, for policy on carbon capture and storage (CCS) has become a fiercely contested battleground, and the outcome of this struggle will have big implications not just for Britain’s energy future, but the world’s. Also at stake are sums of money potentially much larger than £22 billion, for this is a battle that involves cash as well as ideology.
According to Doug Parr, policy director of Greenpeace UK, spending the promised sum to take 8.5 million tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year – just 2.2% of the UK’s total emissions in 2023 – is a poor policy choice, because carbon capture and storage (CCS) will “extend the life of planet-heating oil and gas production”. In his view, “there is a risk of locking ourselves into second-rate solutions.”
Lorenzo Sani, from the climate think tank Carbon Tracker, was also critical, saying the plan was “anchored in outdated and overly optimistic assumptions”, which risked “squandering taxpayer money” on projects that were “high risk”.
It is safe to assume that the 23 authors of a letter to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband last month will have been equally unhappy. Led by academics from universities such as Manchester and Imperial College, they urged him not to make a decision until the projects had been “properly evaluated”.
Like Parr, their chief concern was that funding CCS would “lock the UK into fossil fuel energy generation well past 2050”. This, they went on, would end up by “displacing genuinely zero or low carbon electricity generation”. Instead, the Government should “prioritise funding […] to enable a more rapid transition to renewables”.
In time, their letter concluded, the goal should be an energy system almost entirely reliant on wind and solar electricity. This has an obvious drawback: the fact that sometimes for days or even weeks, the wind does not blow nor the sun shine anything like enough to meet our energy needs. But according to the letter’s authors, “there is increasing evidence that energy security can be achieved from a grid that is almost 100% supplied by renewable energy with a range of storage technologies alongside demand reduction measures such as insulation and low energy heating.”
Professor Myles Allen — Oxford University’s head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics, one of the world’s more eminent climate scientists and a long-time advocate of CCS — vehemently disagrees. One day, technologies such as nuclear fusion may mean oil and gas will be consigned to the past. But not yet: “People who pretend that we are going to be able to stop using fossil fuels altogether any time soon are in some kind of denial,” he told me. “And even if the UK were to do it, the rest of the world won’t.” Britain accounts for just 1% of global emissions.
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SubscribeThey are all delusional idiots. Yet they have all managed to acquire real political power. How on earth has it come to this?
CCC is unserious and expensive. Under the very best scenario, you have automatically increased the cost of energy production by 20%, because that’s how much extra energy is needed to bury CO2. On top of that, you will need a whole series of infrastructure and pipelines to move the CO2 to the sites to be buried.
And where are these sites that can hold vast amounts of gas, and keep adding more for 20 years, or 50 years? Do we really know the environmental implications of burying CO2 in the ground?
The cost of building the Hinkley Point C project is now expected to be $40 billion – which is 500% more expensive per MW than in Korea – but at least you’re getting proven technology that can deliver 7% of the nation’s energy needs.
Lunatics.
‘“there is increasing evidence that energy security can be achieved from a grid that is almost 100% supplied by renewable energy with a range of storage technologies alongside demand reduction measures such as insulation and low energy heating.”’
I looked at the evidence supplied in the letter that 100% renewable energy can cope with periods of low output from solar and wind power.
It says ‘use batteries’ and ‘use hydrogen’
But doesn’t say how much battery power or how much hydrogen will be needed or what cost.
It is an absolute joke.
It says ‘”A strategic energy reserve in the form of long-term and low-cost storage in chemical compounds may be the prime solution for balancing inter-annual resource variations, and detailed analyses should be able to deliver a quantification.”‘
This is magic beans thinking.
Unless , of course, by chemical compounds they mean ‘oil’, or ‘gas’….
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910
U.K. is responsible for0.000012 of CO2 in the atmosphere. Apart from the very dodgy models, we still don‘t have iron clad prove that CO2 is really the reason that The Climate is slightly warming for the last 150 years. The charts of severe weather events ( see R.Pielke Jr.) of the last 100 years show, that they are not getting worse as the politicians and MSM want us to believe. Actually because of the increase of wealth, achieved through fossil fuel, we have much better protection and adapted to these weather events and death tolls actually went hugely down (Bjorn Lomborg). Now clown Miliband and Starmer want to use £22 billion of our tax money to capture 2.2% of the UK’s CO2 output. It is beyond words to describe this utter waste. Why not just throw the money out of helicopters, flying across the country, at least some people might catch some notes and benefit from this.
I comprehend their argument. By selling indulgences not to individuals but to local authorities,corporate bodies and such,ordinary people,the people who if asked would honestly say they care can still drive their cars,and live what since the 1950s for sure most of us think of as a normal basic lifestyle. But what that Green Lobby want is not to.”paper over the cracks”,they want the UK population to embrace a simpler,less “things” oriented lifestyle. The less we have,the less power we need to consume,the less we need to generate. I’m fully in accord with this idea and I’m already soaking nettles to rett for my hair shirt.