Britain will provide funding of up to US$28.5 billion over 25 years to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to curb emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production in northern England, the government said on Friday (Oct 4).
Britain has a climate target to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and has said CCS will be needed to curb emissions from energy intensive industrial sectors as well as to create jobs.
“This game-changing technology will bring 4,000 good jobs and billions of private investment into communities across Merseyside and Teesside,” Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves said in a statement.
CCS involves capturing emissions from power plants and industry to enable them to be stored underground. The technology has been available for years but projects globally have failed to take off due to high costs and questions over the amount of carbon being captured.
Britain’s conservative government that was voted out of office in July had in 2023 promised £20 billion(S$34.1 billion) of CCS funding that was never fully awarded.
The two sites in northern England will have a combined annual carbon capture capacity of 8.5 million metric tons a year, equivalent to taking 4 million cars off the road, the government said.
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The HyNet North West cluster in Merseyside seeks to capture emissions from industrial plants and store them in depleted gas fields in the Irish Sea. It is being developed by a consortium led by Italian energy group Eni.
“HyNet… will decarbonise one of the key energy-intensive industrial districts as well as unlock significant economic growth in this region of the UK,” Eni CEO Claudio Descalzi said in a statement.
Oil and gas majors Equinor and BP are involved in developing a project in Teesside that would store captured emissions under the North Sea.
Green groups criticised the decision.
“For a government that is committed to tackling the climate crisis, £22 billion is a lot of money to spend on something that is going to extend the life of planet-heating oil and gas production,” said Greenpeace UK’s policy director, Doug Parr. REUTERS
