Drax has kicked off a six-month pilot scheme to trial carbon capture and storage (CCS) on one of the now four biomass units at its power station in Yorkshire. The company has invested £400,000 in the project which aims to demonstrate the potential for bioenergy with CCS (BECCS) to deliver “negative emissions” by effectively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Drax Group’s chief executive Will Gardiner said: “Our BECCS pilot project is the UK’s first step to delivering a key technology in the fight against climate change. If this project is successful, it could enable Drax to become the world’s first carbon negative power station – something many would never have dreamed possible a decade ago.
Edie 27th Nov 2018 read more »
The UK’s first carbon capture and storage project should be operational by the mid-2020s, according to ministers. A commitment to develop the technology, which stops greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere, was made ahead of a summit in Edinburgh. Research funding has also been announced for a carbon capture scheme in Aberdeenshire. It will see carbon dioxide piped to storage sites under the North Sea. Experts say the technology is an important tool in tackling climate change. The UK government was criticised in 2015 after a £1bn pound competition to develop carbon capture and storage was dropped. Power stations at Peterhead in Aberdeenshire and Drax in North Yorkshire were the final contenders for the grant. The Acorn Project will capture about 200,000 tonnes of CO2 from the St Fergus Gas Terminal near Peterhead and transport it for storage to one of three depleted gas fields using existing pipelines. It is to receive £175,000 from the UK government, with match funding from the Scottish government and additional European funding. Dr Richard Dixon, director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said that as Scotland’s two coal-fired power stations were now closed “the main rationale for CCS in Scotland has disappeared”. He added: “Instead of chasing something that we don’t need the UK government should be spending its money on renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy storage, all of which deliver immediate reductions in carbon emissions. “There might be a role for CCS in relation to industry in the long term but with fossil fuelled cars being phased out and a crack down on the mountains of plastic we use, even these sources of carbon will decline drastically in the coming decades.”
BBC 28th Nov 2018 read more »
Greenpeace activists climbed a 180-metre (590 feet) chimney at a power station in Belchatow, central Poland, on Tuesday to protest Warsaw’s coal policies ahead of UN climate talks this month. The state-run plant is Poland’s biggest power producer, Europe’s largest polluter and one of the biggest coal power plants in the world. Nine activists climbed an internal ladder to the top of the conical chimney at the plant, which is fuelled by lignite and belongs to PGE. Activists say Poland’s dependence on coal and the disputes between the conservative nationalist government and the European Union could make the climate talks difficult.
Independent 27th Nov 2018 read more »
Claire Perry and Fatih Birol: The recent report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provided a stark reminder about the need for action on climate change. Boosted by supportive government policies and technological improvements, some clean energy technologies are pushing ahead: solar PV has seen spectacular growth in recent years and offshore wind prices in the UK and elsewhere have fallen in price by as much as 50 per cent. But the latest International Energy Agency data also shows that as we lead up to the climate change talks at COP24, global carbon emissions are set to reach a new historic high in 2018. This underlines the challenge the world faces in moving to a low-carbon economy and meeting the ambitions agreed at Paris in 2015. There is international consensus that carbon capture usage and storage – or CCUS – is needed if we are to meet those ambitions, as we look at how we may achieve net-zero emissions in the second half of the century. Yet while CCUS has been shown to work, the world has not yet solved how to deploy it commercially while ensuring that consumers don’t pay over the odds. This is a complex task but one that is increasingly urgent.
FT 28th Nov 2018 read more »
The government has made a commitment to ensure that Britain’s first large-scale carbon-capture and storage facility is fully operational by the middle of the next decade, winning the backing of some of the world’s largest energy companies for a pilot project to inject carbon dioxide into old North Sea oil and gasfields. Claire Perry, the clean energy minister, is set to dedicate £20m of the UK’s industry innovation budget to carbon-capture technology at a joint conference with the International Energy Agency in Edinburgh on Wednesday, as the government tries to accelerate the development of a technology hailed as critical to the world’s efforts to combat climate change. The push to support carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) projects follows a stark warning last month that the world’s efforts to limit climate change face failure unless the technology can quickly become commercially viable.
FT 27th Nov 2018 read more »
The UK Government has announced fresh funding for carbon capture and storage (CCS) Energy Minister Claire Perry has outlined an “action plan” to bring the UK’s first CCS facility up and running by the mid-2020s, committing £45million to innovation and constructing the technology. A £175,000 grant was also announced for the Acorn project at the St Fergus gas plant, match funded by the European Commission, to develop ways of transporting carbon emissions for North Sea storage. It comes after a CCS project at Peterhead Power Station, backed by energy firms SSE and Shell, had to be scrapped in 2015. in the north-east – three years after scrapping a £1bn stake for developing the technology.
Energy Voice 28th Nov 2018 read more »