The British government has decided to cancel its £1bn (€1.4bn) carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme, just six months before it was due to be awarded.
This move is another nail in the coffin of CCS projects in the United Kingdom, after Drax announced in September 2015 that it would stop investments in the White Rose CCS project and that it would withdraw from the Capture Power partnership; the White Rose project was a clean coal power plant project of up to 450 MW equipped with full CCS technology, on the site of Drax’s coal-fired power station, near Selby. The CCS project would have captured about 90% of total CO2 emissions (around 2 MtCO2/year) and inject them beneath the North Sea.
Shell and SSE, the developers of the Peterhead project (aimed to capture around 85% of the CO2 from the 1 180 MW existing CCGT power station at Peterhead, Scotland), have announced that the project was stalled and that Shell would focus its CCS work on other countries.
In November 2015, the United Kingdom reaffirmed its commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by shutting down all coal-fired power plants by 2025 and to develop new gas-fired power plants instead. However, to meet UK's carbon targets, any new power plant would have to stop generating by 2030, unless CCS is implemented, which is made unlikely by the cancellation of the CCS competition.