Who will solve the carbon capture conundrum?
Two new multibillion-pound projects could make the UK a world leader in cutting emissions, says Joe Shute
The centre of the chemical engineering department at Imperial College London is dominated by a cluster of stainless steel pipes stretching four storeys high. This pilot plant is part of Britain’s largest carbon capture research programme and intended to demonstrate to students best practice in capturing and storing harmful carbon dioxide.
It works like so: a similar gas to that exhaled by a car exhaust or domestic boiler flue is bubbled up through a chemical solution which separates and captures the CO2. This is then heated up to around 120C to release a pure stream of CO2. As the pilot plant demonstrates, the carbon can then be sequestered to stop extra greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.
If it sounds a simple solution to the climate crisis then the reality is anything but. For decades now, carbon capture technology has been hailed as a possible panacea, but one which remains tantalisingly out of reach.
The latest resurgence for the industry has come this week, with the Government’s new strategy to transition to net zero by 2050. Ministers are doubling down on the technology by announcing two multibillion-pound carbon capture projects in the north of England by the middle of the decade as part of its fast-track scheme to cut 20-30 million tons of CO2 a year from heavy industry by 2030. In announcing the support for the new projects, energy minister Greg Hands told Parliament carbon capture would be “essential to meeting our net zero ambitions” and was “an exciting new industry”.
As well as becoming a key pillar of its efforts to decarbonise, the Government hopes that by the end of the decade carbon capture will support up to 54,000 jobs and have attracted £12 billion in public and private investment, making Britain a world leader in the field.
The problem remains that over recent years numerous carbon capture projects have failed to materialise. The fear is that carbon capture could be less magic bullet, more white elephant, and, critics argue, end up as a smokescreen for heavy industry to simply burn more fossil fuels. Given the fact that the technology hasn’t yet been deployed at scale in the UK, even supporters admit the push for carbon capture is something of a gamble. “I’m optimistic about this and think the benefits could be genuinely as announced,” says Prof Martin Blunt, of Imperial’s carbon capture storage research group and who has been researching the field for the past three decades. “The thing that is untried is putting all the pieces together: capture, transport and storage.”
Broadly speaking, carbon capture can be split into two processes: direct air carbon capture, in which CO2 is literally sucked out of the sky, and ground capture technology, which halts emissions at source and stores them underground.
The former is the far more nascent technology and was particularly championed by the Prime Minister’s former adviser Dominic Cummings.
Last year, the Government announced £100 million in funding to research direct air capture technology although critics point to it currently being hugely expensive and an inefficient use of energy.
Several companies have created working air capture plants, such as the newly opened Orca facility in Iceland. But according to one estimate, it presently costs nearly £500 to remove a single ton of CO2 from the air.
The alternative approach – storing carbon at source – is a far more proven technology and yet remains fraught with challenges. The capture is the relatively easy bit – the oil industry has been separating natural gas from carbon for decades in order to sell it on international markets, and burning the surplus CO2 into the atmosphere. But what happens if you want to store it is decidedly more tricky.
It remains, explains Tom Baxter, a chemical engineer with 40 years’ experience working in the oil and gas industry, and now a visiting professor at Strathclyde University, astronomically expensive for companies to properly sequester the carbon. He says the costs can run into hundreds of millions of pounds per plant, something attested to by the litany of failed carbon capture projects around Britain.
For example, a major project was planned at the coal-fired power station Longannet in Fife, but was shelved a decade ago. In 2015, a similar scheme at Peterhead power station also failed to materialise. In a further blow to the industry, that same year the then chancellor George Osborne decided against committing £1 billion to carbon capture storage.
“The problem is it makes no commercial sense and is a drain on your bottom line with no payback,” Baxter says. “If there is no legislation telling you to do it, why would you?”
If properly incentivised, however, there is proof it can be done. The world’s first carbon capture storage plant has been in operation in the Sleipner oil field in the North Sea since
‘Unless we can capture emissions and store them, the world is in a fix’
1996. It was established after the Norwegian government introduced a carbon tax upon the emissions of the oil industry and each year about one million tons of carbon is captured and stored 800 million beneath the seabed.
Similar projects are in operation elsewhere but there is concern in some quarters about the potential unintended consequences of injecting so much carbon dioxide back into the earth. In 2011, a major carbon capture project in Salah, Algeria, was cancelled after geologists noticed the land above the depleted oil field where the gas was being pumped back had risen by a few centimetres.
However, supporters say these are mere teething problems in a rapidly expanding industry and far outweighed by its potential benefits. The British-based company Carbon Clean, which was established by Indian tech entrepreneur Aniruddha Sharma in 2009 and has since received around £8 million in UK government funding, supplies equipment to nearly 40 carbon capture facilities around the globe and, as of last year, estimates it has removed one million metric tons of carbon from the atmosphere.
Sharma will be trialling his pioneering technology – which he says brings down the cost of carbon capture from $60-$200 (£40-£145) a ton to $30 (£20) per ton by shrinking the size of the equipment involved – at next month’s Cop26 climate conference in Glasgow. His company has partnered with the Acorn carbon capture project on the east coast of Scotland which the Government has highlighted as a “reserve cluster” should either of its new projects announced in northern England fail.
Sharma describes the Government’s renewed commitment to carbon capture as “extremely exciting”, adding that finally “they are walking the talk”.
Similarly positive noises are emanating from North Yorkshire’s Drax power plant, which in 2018 established the first bioenergy carbon capture and storage project in Europe. According to Ross Mckenzie, group director of international affairs, by 2027 it is hoped to be deployed at scale, capturing up to 4 million tons of carbon per year, rising to 8 million tons by 2030. “At Drax, we stand ready to invest £2 billion in this technology,” Mckenzie says.
Over the past 30 years, the whole world has managed to capture and stop some 139 megatons of carbon from entering the atmosphere. In order to meet the target of net zero by 2050, the International Energy Agency estimates this will need to increase to 7,740 megatons across the globe.
Despite the Government’s bold new climate ambitions, Prof Martin Blunt says it remains an unpalatable fact that fossil fuels will continue to be a part of Britain’s energy mix for some time to come. “And unless we capture those emissions and store them,” he says, “the world is in a fix.”