No new coal-fired power stations will be built in Britain unless they are equipped with technology to capture at least a quarter of their carbon emissions, the government has said.
Energy secretary Ed Miliband has also announced that four new coal power plants would be built in the UK but that they will have to extract and bury all their greenhouse gas emissions by 2025.
The four new plants will be built if fitted with the technology to trap and store their carbon dioxide emmissions underground. The government has said that should the plans work, carbon capture and storage (CCS) will be installed across all new coal-fired power plants to cover emissions within five years once proven. Consumers will subsidise the building of the plans through power companies. Full story
Stakeholder Response: Campaign to Protect Rural England
CPRE welcomes Ed Miliband's announcement that the government will press ahead with testing out carbon capture and storage technology. We have no doubt that coal-fired power without CCS would be a disaster for government climate change policy, and would critically undermine any claims to leadership it makes in this area. As such, the announcement shows vision, and is encouraging evidence that Mr Miliband is prepared to fight the environmental corner within government against less forward-thinking forces, and has the clout to win important battles.
But before we get too carried away, we should study the fine print of the announcement. Coal-fired plant will not be required to have 100 per cent CCS until 2025 and, until then, coal-fired power stations will only be required to capture and store some 25 per cent of their emissions. Surely the urgency of the climate change challenge requires a more robust policy?
And we must also remember that we are still talking about a technology that has yet to prove itself on a large scale. It is absolutely right that the government is prepared to commit money to seeing whether CCS can work, but we will be in a disastrous position if it does not, but the government has given the go-ahead for a new generation of coal-fired stations on the basis that it might. We would then be left with an army of carbon-belching monsters with nothing to mitigate their impact.
For this reason, we believe that the government should retro-fit CCS to existing power plants for demonstration purposes, rather than using the technology as a Trojan horse to push through new ones, like the hotly disputed application at Kingsnorth in Kent, which we and other environmental groups have united in opposing. This would be the sensible, cautious approach, allowing the research to take place, but without putting the UK's prospects of ever meeting its climate change targets in jeopardy. We look to Mr Miliband to show more decisive leadership in bringing this about.
Stakeholder Response: Institution of Engineering and Technology
There is an urgent need to decide one way or the other on how to treat coal fired power plant. Leaving this in limbo will exacerbate the looming shortage of generation around 2015. The IET feels that the government announcement on 23 April 2009 demonstrates an interesting structuring and presentation of the problem and potentially a way forward. It has the potential to put UK in a leadership position in a major part of the global solution to climate change.
CCS demonstration from day one means all things to do with CCS at the 300 MW level have to be in place for all plant involved concurrently with a four year or so plant construction schedule. Given that the new coal is needed by around 2015 or earlier to replace closing old coal this means that work must move forward rapidly to develop regulatory arrangements for CO2 transport, to govern the storage arrangements, and to give confidence in the levy system.
CCS has a large negative impact on station efficiency, so clarity over who pays for the additional fuel costs of operating with CCS is needed. If the generator is expected to pay we can expect perverse outcomes, Eg.
• The CCS being declared unavailable but the relevant generating unit being available – ie. build it but don't use it. This would need to be prevented in the relevant regulations.
• In say a 2x800 MW plant with 400 MW of CCS we would have one unabated unit at say 40 per cent efficiency and an abated unit at say 38 per cent efficiency. The generator would have a clear incentive to run the unabated unit first. This would need to be guarded against, as it is currently for flue gas desulphurisation plant at power stations.
• It could even in extremis create a perverse incentive to build plants with inefficient 400 MW units for the levy to pay to be fitted with CCS (and hardly used) alongside much larger and more efficient unabated units – again something that would need to be prevented.
The requirement to retrofit full CCS in the future when the Environment Agency (EA) says the technology is proven will introduce some interesting uncertainties for generators, as it will effectively impose a large cost at an unknown future time. The impact of this on whether generators find it too risky to build coal plant will need to be tested in the consultation. If the risks are too high generators will most likely respond by switching to building gas fired plant.
If all new coal plants have to fit full CCS within five years of the EA blowing a whistle this will cause very substantial stress to an embryonic equipment, skills and services supply chain for the new technologies of CCS, resulting in high costs and potentially delivery delays. It would be better to find a way to phase it over a few more years. One way to assist this would be for the EA to publish regular assessments of its view of technology readiness to give some level of signalling ahead of time.
In conclusion, there are some good principles here but the detail needs much more thinking through, some of what is presented is not helpful in that regard. The IET urges all parties to engage constructively in the consultation with a view to making this important and necessary policy both practical and achievable.
Stakeholder Response: Unite
Unite's national officer Dougie Rooney said: "This is world leading environmental technology; it presents the opportunity to create thousands of skilled jobs.
"Britain has the lead in developing this technology, but we need to capitalise on this lead to create an engineering supply chain that can manufacture the necessary components and equipment.
"The export potential is massive. The government must now co-ordinate the companies interested in being part of the engineering supply chain for clean coal, carbon capture and new nuclear. The opportunity of creating thousands of highly skilled jobs over the next five years cannot be missed, it has to be realised.
"This announcement gives our nation more security of supply and control over its energy costs. It will also create jobs in the construction industry and we must ensure that UK construction workers are given the opportunity to work on these projects."
