The government of the United Kingdom has issued an action plan aimed at setting up the country's first carbon capture usage and storage (CCS) project by the middle of the next decade, followed by full-scale CCS projects in the 2030s. It estimates that CCS projects will be the key solution to decarbonise certain key industrial sectors before 2050 and investments funds of £20m (€23m) will be provided to support the construction of such projects at industrial sites across the country under the framework of a £100m (€113m) innovation investment commitment.
Special attention will be paid to the Acorn project in Scotland, which aims at capturing 200,000 tCO2/year from the St Fergus Gas Terminal near Peterhead and transport it for storage to an offshore depleted gas field in the neighbourhood via an existing subsea pipeline. It will receive £175,000 (€197,000) of government investment along with Scottish and European funds.
This announcement comes after the UK power utility Drax Group commissioned an innovative Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS) demonstration project at at the 2,580 MW Drax coal-fired power plant in North Yorkshire (United Kingdom), as part of its conversion project. It will capture 1 tCO2/d from the gases produced when biomass-fired power is generated at the power plant.