The U.K. government should not have backed out of a £1 billion carbon capture and storage commercialization competition, Paul Goodfellow, head of Shell’s U.K. and Ireland operations, said Thursday at the University of Aberdeen’s 2016 U.K. Oil & Gas Collaboration Conference, the BBC reported.
“I do think it is a viable technology that should be used to help with decarbonization, but it’s early in the technology phase, and therefore there is a collaborative approach needed between industry and government,” Goodfellow told the BBC.
The U.K. on Nov. 25, 2015, officially canceled the competition, in which two projects, including Shell’s Peterhead CCS project, remained in the running for £1 billion in funding. The government launched the competition in 2012, and a funding decision had been expected within a matter of months. Both Peterhead and the other remaining initiative, the White Rose CCS Project in Yorkshire, managed by the Capture Power consortium, have been put on hold following the cancellation.
“With government pulling out, that is not the right time for us to progress that at this point,” Goodfellow said. “But we would hope to be able to use that technology in the future, and of course we are using it elsewhere in the world already.”
