Last remaining project in government competition for CCS funding scrapped as partners fall out over funding

A pioneering £1bn state-funded carbon capture and storage (CCS) project at the Longannet power station in Fife has been cancelled, as the government announced that “a decision has been made not to proceed with Longannet but to pursue other projects with the £1bn funding made available by the government.”

Earlier this month, the Guardian revealed that Longannet, the only remaining project in the government’s competition for CCS funding was on the brink of collapse because Scottish Power and its partners, Shell and the National Grid, were concerned about its commercial viability without more public backing.

David Cameron cast doubt on the future on the project during prime minister’s questions, when he said the scheme “isn’t working”. Tom Greatrex asked : “Given the importance of CCS both as a way of reducing emissions and as an exportable technology, can the PM confirm the Longannet scheme is going ahead?”

JOSH WINGROVE EDMONTON Alberta thrives on the strength of its oil and gas sector, while coal keeps the province’s lights on – as such, in an era where many demand lower emissions, the province is a carbon giant looking to change its ways.

Choking the output of those industries, however, could be economically devastating. So rather than limiting the actual amount produced, the province has pinned its hopes on a process known as carbon capture and storage (CCS), which would see carbon collected and buried deep below ground.

On Wednesday afternoon, Alberta Energy Minister Ron Liepert announced a final agreement on its third such CCS project. The province promised $2-billion in seed money three years ago, but only this year has approved projects.

Calgary-based Swan Hills Synfuels LP aims to use an unproven method, coal gasification, to reach 1.4-kilometre-deep coal deposits in central Alberta, convert them to gas underground, capture the emissions before they ever see daylight and use the gaseous coal to run a power plant.

The new plant would serve a whopping 300,000 homes while producing one-third the emissions of a similarly sized regular coal plant – or about the same carbon output as a natural-gas plant.

The energy firm has withdrawn from competition for the first CCS plant, saying the station would have been uneconomic to build

Environmentalists claimed a victory over E.ON today when the German energy company confirmed it was shelving plans to build its Kingsnorth coal plant after years of protests.

The company said it was pulling the project out of the government’s competition to build the first of four planned large pilot plants to demonstrate technology for capturing and storing some of the carbon that would usually be emitted into the atmosphere.

Kingsnorth became a rallying point for environmentalists as it would have been the first new coal station to be built in the UK for decades. E.ON said depressed power prices made it uneconomic, becoming the latest bidder to withdraw from a race that now has just one company left in it.

It means that no new coal plant will be built as part of the current carbon capture competition. The sole remaining contender – ScottishPower’s Longannet plant – is an existing coal power station on to which the CCS technology would be added.

The document from Houston University claims that governments wanting to use CCS have overestimated its value and says it would take a reservoir the size of a small US state to hold the CO2 produced by one power station.

Previous modelling has hugely underestimated the space needed to store CO2 because it was based on the “totally erroneous” premise that the pressure feeding the carbon into the rock structures would be constant, argues Michael Economides, professor of chemical engineering at Houston, and his co-author Christene Ehlig-Economides, professor of energy engineering at Texas A&M University

“It is like putting a bicycle pump up against a wall. It would be hard to inject CO2 into a closed system without eventually producing so much pressure that it fractured the rock and allowed the carbon to migrate to other zones and possibly escape to the surface,” Economides said.

The paper concludes that CCS “is not a practical means to provide any substantive reduction in CO2 emissions, although it has been repeatedly presented as such by others.”

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Chapman pointed out that Statoil, a Norwegian oil company, had been injecting CO2 into an old reservoir on the North Sea Sleipner field for some time as a successful experiment in carbon storage. But Economides says the Sleipner scheme involved a million tonnes over three years, while one 500mW commercial station would need to absorb and store 3m tonnes annually for 25 years.Economides, who admits he veers towards being something of a climate change sceptic, says the oil and coal industries see these schemes as potential solutions so they can keep on doing what they have been doing in the past, but “CCS is the last refuge of the scoundrel,” he said.”

There, the government has set aside $2-billion for carbon sequestration – capturing carbon and burying it. The McKinsey study says, yes, retrofitting coal-fired plants with carbon capture and storage or building new ones with that technology definitely removes carbon but at a high price per tonne.

You can see this in Alberta’s first efforts. More than half of the $2-billion has been pledged to two projects that, if they work, will remove only 2.1 million tonnes of carbon, a tiny fraction of Alberta’s total emissions.

At this rate of spending, the $2-billion might remove less than 5 per cent of the province’s emissions based on Alberta’s total emissions today. Of course, when emissions rise as tar sands production grows, so the carbon capture contributions will shrink as a share of the whole.”