Grant Shapps says tapping into carbon capture trillions ‘will power up Britain’

The Government plans to gamble on technology to capture and store carbon dioxide in undersea caverns as part of its “power up Britain” strategy. The nation could become a hub for carbon capture and storage (CCS) with the ability to store 78 billion tonnes of gas.

Mr Shapps said: “The world needs to deal with its tons of carbon. It needs to get rid of it. The European capacity that we hold in our basin in the North Sea is probably sufficient to take about 85 percent of Europe’s CO2 tracking requirements for the next two and a half centuries.

“So if you think of the size, the scale and the potential of this CCS technology, it is immense and it all comes about because of our geology.”

He called CCS a “massive opportunity” with the potential of contributing several trillion pounds to the economy eventually.

CCS involves the capture of CO2 emissions from industrial processes.

This carbon is then transported from where it was produced, via ship or in a pipeline, and stored deep underground in geological formations.

Rishi Sunak and Mr Shapps, who visited Culham Science Centre, and were taken around by the CEO of UK Atomic Energy Authority Prof Sir Ian Chapman and the Chair of UKAEA Prof David Gann, unveiled the green plan.

It sees the Government stress its already-announced £20billion investment in carbon capture technology and backing for new projects.

Mr Shapps said it would create new jobs and make the UK a world leader in the technology.

But scientists have called CCS “ineffective” and an extremely costly experiment”.

Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in Climate Science at Imperial College London’s Grantham Institute, said: “Carbon capture is currently ineffective and an extremely costly experiment, distracting from the measures that we know are effective and can implement today.

“The UK government should not be investing £20billion in a strategy that is essentially an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff when we could use the money to not go down the cliff in the first place.”

Andy Mayer, an energy analyst at think tank the Institute of Economic Affairs, accused the Government of going “precisely the wrong direction”.

He added: “They are placing speculative bets and using taxpayer money on a series of unproven technologies – from carbon capture and storage to heat pumps and hydrogen.”

Simon Virley, head of energy and natural resources at KPMG in the UK, said it was good news that the first eight CCS projects in Teesside and Merseyside are now going to move forward.

He added: “But the absence of any projects in the Humber region, the largest industrial cluster in the UK, is a real setback.

“Promises of further rounds will be little consolation to those investors having to make tough investment decisions right now.

“If we want to be ‘world leaders’ in hydrogen and CCS, we have to be bolder and move more quickly, particularly given the support now on offer in the US and the EU for industrial decarbonisation.”

The UK is in a global race for investment with the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) in the United States and the EU Net Zero Industry Act

The Act offers billions of dollars in subsidies to build green infrastructure and to incentivise the take-up of electric cars.

Downing Street said that the UK did not need to enter a “subsidy race” with other countries.

Chancellor Jeremy Hunt will return later this year with a response to the IRA, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said.

He added: “We would say we have acted in advance of the US in terms of our approach to reducing our carbon emissions.”

Jess Ralston, the head of energy at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit warned the Chancellor pushing back Britain’s response to the IRA could be the “final nail in the coffin” for businesses who want long-term policy and regulatory certainty.

source: express.co.uk