Karen Frantz
GHG Monitor
2/28/2014
The United Kingdom and Shell signed a multi-million pound contract for engineering, design and financial work in the form of a Front End Engineering and Design (FEED) study for the Peterhead carbon capture and storage project this week, taking the project to the next phase of development that is expected to continue through next year. UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Edward Davey, said he was “pleased” about the development. “Today’s announcement follows the award in December of a FEED contract to the White Rose project in Yorkshire, and marks a key milestone in the government’s CCS Competition,” he said in a statement. “We are investing around £100m from our £1bn budget to take the Peterhead and White Rose CCS projects to the next stage of development—which together could support over 2,000 jobs during construction and provide clean electricity for over 1 million homes. In late 2015, the projects will take final investment decisions, with the government taking decisions shortly after. By bringing forward CCS, we could save more than £30bn a year by 2050. Without it, achieving an affordable, low-carbon energy mix with renewable and nuclear energy alone will be much more difficult and more expensive.”
The Peterhead project will retrofit CCS technology onto a 385 MW portion of an existing gas-fired power plant in Scotland, transporting the CO2 via an existing underground pipeline and storing it in a depleted gas field in the North Sea. The project is expected to capture about 85 percent of the CO2 from the power station, at 1 million tonnes of CO2 a year, and it would be the world’s first industrial-scale CCS project for a gas power plant. The project is expected to be operational by the end of the decade.