UK Climate Change Committee backs carbon catpure and storage for gas-fired power stations

At the end of the week in which BP agreed to suspend dividend payments in recognition of the scale of the liabilities it has incurred in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the chairman of the UK's Committee on Climate Change advised UK government to require all new gas-fired power stations to be fitted wit carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology by 2020.

The idea of CCS is to capture the carbon dioxide created by when energy is generated by burning fossil fuels and prevent it getting into the atmosphere, thereby reducing the rate at which greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere. The catch is that the process of capturing and storing carbon dioxide is expensive and energy-intensive, so the power station become less efficient both in economic terms and in the sense that less electrical energy is generated for each cubic metre of gas (or tonne of coal) consumed.

The Climate Change Committee is due to release next week a comprehensive report which we will report back on here. We went to hear CCC's Julia King speak on Wednesday evening at Science Capital's event on Transition to a low-carbon economy in Birmingham. Her talk was impressive, demonstrating thorough and comprehensive knowledge of all things CO2, and a clear commitment to finding ways to hit the UK's ambitious emissions reduction targets. The event gave the region an opportunity to showcase relevent research, a lot of which centres on the electric car and its cousin the hydrogen-fuelled car, both of which sound cleaner than petrol/diesel-fuelled cars, but of course what really matters is how the electricity is generated in the first place. A graph produced by one of the other speakers confirmed the intuitive notion that emissions scale with the weight being carried per passenger. This can be interpreted as signalling the way towards manufacturing lighter and lighter cars, or towards investment in attracting car travellers onto frequent trains and buses.

In summary, a week in which the upstream oil industry continues to suffer from the impact of the Deepwater environmental disaster, while on the other hand prospects look more positive for business which can add value in the carbon capture and storage supply chain (for a technological description see the Royal Society of Chemistry's website) and maybe for the elecric vehcle industry.