Will the costs of carbon capture justify its benefits?

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) often appears to be one of those technologies that is perpetually 10 years away. It doesn’t help that in the UK we’ve had several false starts thanks to the collapse of the first government funding competition to build a demonstration plant and an attempt to add CCS to the controversial idea of building the country’s first new coal plant in decades.

But now things are starting to look more promising. This week, the next tranche of funds was confirmed for the second of the government’s two preferred bidders in its revamped CCS competition, Peterhead gas power station in the north east of Scotland. Work will now begin on a £100m programme of engineering studies before the final go ahead is given to the Peterhead project and its coal counterpart, the White Rose project at the Drax power station in North Yorkshire.

Once completed, Peterhead will capture up to 1m tonnes a year of carbon dioxide from the exhaust of its 385MW combined cycle gas turbines using amine solvents, and pipe it offshore to the Goldeneye gas reservoir, 2km below the North Sea bed. White Rose, meanwhile, will see the creation of a new 426MW oxy-fuel combustion plant, where coal is burnt in oxygen instead of air to produce a pure stream of CO2 (2m tonnes a year) that will then be piped into saline aquifers off the coast. This will include the building of a new pipeline system with a capacity of 17m tonnes a year, paving the way for a cluster of CCS plants around the Humber. 

These projects are important not because they will demonstrate that it’s possible to capture CO2 from power stations (several plants in countries including Germany and the US have already done this), but because they will join up the three elements of capture, transport and storage and highlight the UK’s strong potential to become CCS world leader.

Unlike Germany, where CCS has been hampered by public opposition to onshore underground CO2 storage, the UK has access to vast amounts of offshore storage in both aquifers and empty gas fields. There’s also the chance to use the captured CO2 to improve North Sea drilling operations and tap otherwise uneconomic reservoirs by using it for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), helping make CCS more commercially viable. We also have a strong research base and a financial mechanism to support low-carbon power generation (the bit of our energy bills that will subsidise new nuclear, renewables and, eventually, CCS).

The argument for CCS is pretty persuasive from a decarbonisation point of view. It might be an untested system with initially high costs that will still produce some CO2 emissions (around 10 per cent of a fossil fuel power station’s total with current technologies) and still requires a constant supply of difficult to produce fuel, whose cost is volatile at best. However, it also produces a flexible, dependable source of energy that could even help remove CO2 from the atmosphere (if we attach CCS technology to biomass plants).

None of our other options – nuclear or renewables ­– can be easily turned on or off to meet our fluctuating power demands. Without a cheap form of mass energy storage, which we’re not particular close to developing, CCS looks like our best bet for a cost-effective, low-carbon way to meet the gap between our energy supply and demand.

Current estimates suggest CCS could become cost-competitive with offshore wind by the 2020s, and with the price coming down faster. Research by the Energy Technologies Institute indicates that using CCS rather than continuing to rely on CO2-emitting gas plants for flexible power supply will reduce the need to decarbonise transport, heating and industry, with overall savings of up to £32bn by 2050.

What will it mean for UK engineering? We should probably tone down our ideas of a new manufacturing sector exporting UK-grown technology to the world. The major companies developing CCS systems are based elsewhere and the Far East is likely to offer a more attractive home to much of the manufacturing. However, the crossover between CCS and the chemical and offshore gas industries does create an opportunity for UK firms to get in on the action with some supply chain production and expertise in services.

In that sense, these demonstration plants could really be the start of a new world-leading UK industry. One estimate suggests 13GW of CCS-equipped low-carbon generation could be up and running by 2030, generating £3bn-£6.5bn annually for the UK economy and supporting 70,000-100,000 jobs.

To get there, however, we will to provide major financial support to a raft of projects following the initial £1bn given to the current competition. The idea is that the second generation of UK plants will raise their building costs from the private sector but still rely on subsidies for operational costs. And these subsidies could be much greater than the prices we’re currently agreeing to pay for nuclear (around £90/MWh) or offshore wind (£155/MWh). We’ll also need to support research into other CCS technologies, for both power station and industrial emissions. And continue to develop the transport and storage infrastructure. Then finally we’ll get to the third generation of plants that are cost-competitive with renewables but will probably still need subsidies.

If CCS is really our cheapest option for meeting our CO2 targets, then it puts the debate about shale gas into a whole new light. Fracking might produce a reliable new low-carbon energy source but it certainly won’t bring electricity prices down.

This article first appeared on The Engineer. 

Educating the public is key to reclaiming our nuclear heritage

It probably says something about me that I used a day off from my job at The Engineer earlier this week to visit a nuclear power station. But it’s to my shame that this was also the first time I had ever made such a visit.

It was a fascinating trip and one I would urge anyone with an interest in engineering, infrastructure or the environment to take themselves. Seeing first-hand the scale of the reactor, feeling the heat it generates and studying the intricacies of the technology that controls it reminds you what British engineering is capable of. And learning about the safety systems and culture in place and about how much electricity can be produced from so relatively little fuel certainly makes you re-evaluate the role nuclear power has to play in our energy mix.

I made the visit as a member of the public, not as a journalist, so I won’t give too many details about what I saw. In fact, before I began the tour I was made to sign a contract stating I wouldn’t pass on information to third parties without the agreement of EDF Energy, which operates the UK’s nuclear plants. Which seems rather strange given that the point of allowing public tours of the power station is surely to help spread information.

Presumably it’s a hangover from the last decade, when Britain’s remaining nuclear industry effectively closed its doors and reinitiated a culture of secrecy in response to the perceived terrorist threat following 9/11. There is, of course, a vital need to guard the proprietary and potentially catastrophically dangerous technology contained with nuclear power stations. But my visit also made me realise there’s also a very strong case for doing more to educate the public about nuclear power.

Few people really understand what went wrong during the disasters at Chernobyl or Fukushima, or how other power stations have learnt from those events. My tour guide made several references to how visitors typically imagined a nuclear plant as something similar to the one in The Simpsons, but in reality there are no glowing green rods being handled or contaminated water flows into rivers of three-eyed fish. She also told the story of one visitor from Nigeria who was terrified of receiving a dose of radiation until it was explained she was in greater danger from the cosmic rays in the atmosphere she had been exposed to on the flight over.

Unless the public has a sound knowledge of how nuclear energy is produced, how can they be expected to make sensible decisions about its future use in this country? I grew up just 20 miles from a nuclear power station and yet new nothing of how they operated until I started working at The Engineer. If British industry wants a new nuclear future then it needs to do more – in partnership with government – to educate people about its advantages and safeguards.

There’s another reason for doing this besides our need for new low-carbon sources of energy. Like most in the UK, the nuclear plant I visited was in an area with little other industry and where jobs were scarce. And when those power stations were built they not only needed workers to run them but also created demand for the rest of UK industry. But the decision to end nuclear development in favour of North Sea oil and the subsequent decline of British nuclear manufacturing means that most of the components for the next generation of power stations will be built abroad.

Chancellor George Osborne yesterday said nuclear power could help the UK tackle climate change in ‘as cheap a possible way’. I’m not sure how the price of £92.50/MWh agreed for the first new power station (double the expected market rate and greater than that of onshore wind) is cheap. As long as foreign (often state-owned or backed) companies are the ones building and supplying nuclear power, it’s hard to see how the overall costs to Britain can come down substantially.

However, there is hope that the new-build programme could be a springboard to a nuclear manufacturing renaissance. Hitachi is planning to build a module construction facility here to support its involvement in two new power stations. The Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (NAMRC) in Sheffield is helping firms used to working to the precision standards of aerospace transfer their capabilities to the nuclear sector. Sheffield Forgemasters has just been approved to fabricate safety-critical cast components for the nuclear industry. In Rolls-Royce, we even have a major company that builds nuclear reactors (for submarines) already.

With the right aspiration and conditions, these firms could lead the UK back into a high-value manufacturing sector that couldn’t be easily displaced by cheap foreign factories. This should help bring down the costs of an energy source that it’s becoming increasingly clear will be a vital component of our fight against climate change.

But it requires a long-term commitment to nuclear power with full public backing. Nuclear manufacturing is arguably one of the most difficult industries for a country to break into, requiring a deep knowledge and skills base, unique physical capabilities and a strong supply chain. Having squandered our pioneering first foray into this sector, let’s make sure our second attempt isn’t a false start.

This article first appeared on The Engineer.