Abby L. Harvey
GHG Monitor
12/19/2014
New funding totaling £2.5 million to develop carbon storage sites in the North Sea has been made available by the U.K.’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, the DECC announced this week. The funding will be delivered by the Energy Technologies Institute, a U.K.-based energy research, development and demonstration company. “The primary objective of this Project is to progress the appraisal of five stores, down-selected as part of the Project, towards readiness for [Final Investment Decision] so that prospective capture projects will see an abundance of storage options [approximately] 30 years into the future. The work will add significantly to the de-risking of these stores and be transferable to storage developers to complete the more capital intensive parts of storage development,” the ETI said in a Request for Proposals.
Interested parties will have until Feb. 5, 2015, to submit proposals and contracts are intended to be awarded and work to begin by next spring. “It is hoped that the Government funding will catalyse further funding from other partners and industry. Developing a storage site from scratch can take 6-9 years – therefore it is important this work is started now to ensure sites will be ready and available when they are needed,” according to the release.
The announcement was praised by Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage, an independent research partnership of the British Geological Survey, Heriot-Watt University, the University of Aberdeen, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Strathclyde. “Today’s funding announcement is a positive indication that DECC is planning ahead for a second phase of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) development, following what we hope will be the realisation of the UK’s first large-scale demonstration projects, Peterhead and White Rose. It signals a strong commitment to seeing the development of CO2 storage sites in the UK move from theoretical to licensable,” Stuart Haszeldine, SCCS Director said in an press release.
