UK carbon capture strategy ‘outdated and unrealistic’ as costs doubled

Drax power station, generating 7% of Britain’s needs, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips.

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The policy was unrealistic even before it bacame outdated. The costs have already put most climate-obsessed countries off, and the UK can’t avoid that barrier either.
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The UK Government’s energy policy centred around carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) is outdated and unrealistic, a new report has warned.

Think tank Carbon Tracker has today said that cost estimates for deploying CCUS have more than doubled from the £20bn in taxpayer funding initially scoped in December last year, reports City AM.

This strategy was based on the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, published in the sixth carbon budget in December 2020.

The report also claims that the government’s plan to capture around 20-30m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year has now slimmed by around one-third due to the growth of renewables, battery storage and flexible [Talkshop comment – undefined] technologies.

The think tank also warned that the UK is targeting applications where CCUS could lock consumers into what it describes as a “high-cost and fossil-based future”, despite the existence of cleaner and cheaper alternatives.

It argued that plans to use CCUS to de-carbonise steel production and gas-fired power plants should be abandoned, with both applications likely to be out-competed by cleaner alternatives as has been seen by Tata Steel’s abandonment of plans for CCUS at its Port Talbot site in favour of a move towards a cleaner steel production system.

Where CCUS is truly facing its toughest test however is with biomass generation and specifically, the incredibly costly, incredibly polluting wood-burning biomass plant run by Drax in North Yorkshire.

The Drax conversion is likely to require a complex subsidy scheme together with a government-provided bridging mechanism that could lock taxpayers’ money into a long (15-25 years) and costly (£26-43bn) contract.

Furthermore, Carbon Tracker contends that the resulting electricity would be up to three times more expensive for consumers than offshore wind power. [Talkshop comment – baseload vs. intermittency issue ignored].

Full report here.
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Image: Drax power station, generating ~7% of Britain’s electricity, is partly converted to burning imported woodchips.