A preliminary announcement about the first stage of the government’s £1 billion carbon capture and storage (CCS) funding competition is expected in the new year.
The controversial competition, which aims to build a commercial-scale CCS plant by 2014, was launched in 2007, and is now running late.
Just two proposals are left in the running: Scottish Power’s Longannet power station, and E.On’s plans for a new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent. A number of projects have dropped out, most recently RWE Npower’s station at Tilbury in Essex.
Simon Hughes, Liberal Democrat spokesman on energy and climate change, said: “We’re slow off the mark with CCS, and Europe has been poor at developing a coherent policy. There is going to be increasing tightness on public expenditure, but we shouldn’t cut back on R&D for this – it should be increased. We would like to see CCS clusters in the Thames estuary, Humber estuary and the east coast of Scotland.
“There are no engineering and technical barriers to CCS.” |
