Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
10/30/2015
Decarbonizing the United Kingdom’s energy sector will be a complex process with many variables, including the commercialization of carbon capture and storage technology, according to a report by the Royal Academy of Engineering released this week. “What is required now is a combination of known technologies, scaled up to unprecedented levels, integrated in smarter ways. Many of these technologies are largely established in principle but have not yet been fully tested as commercial investments and operations,” the report says.
One such technology is CCS, which has yet to be widely demonstrated at commercial scale. Only one commercial-scale project is currently operational, SaskPower’s Boundary Dam post-combustion project in Saskatchewan, Canada. Other projects are nearing completion, such as the Kemper County Energy Facility, a new-build CCS project located in Meridian, Miss, but the U.K.’s attempts to commercialize the technology have progressed slowly. “The technical challenges are understood but costs are not, and in the UK no full-scale demonstration plant has yet started construction. Government has made £1bn of grants available,” the report says.
Two projects are currently competing for the government grant money: Royal Dutch Shell’s Peterhead CCS project in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and the White Rose CCS project in Yorkshire, the latter of which recently experienced a setback in the loss of a major stakeholder. According to the Royal Academy report, the “two projects must take advantage of that funding and begin construction. If they are operational by early 2020s, the UK could contribute to the world market in this technology, which is already developing in North America and China. If they are not, decarbonisation of the electricity system will be at serious risk.”
To push CCS development forward, the report says, a focus must be placed on solving the economic problems facing the technology. “The main challenge will be economic, whether based on a price for carbon through the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) or other support mechanism for storing carbon, a way needs to be found to make CCS economically viable, and this will only begin to happen when the technology is fully demonstrated at scale,” the report says.
