Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Friday that planned government investment of nearly 22 billion pounds ($28.8 billion) in carbon capture and storage marked a “landmark week” for Britain.
Starmer announced the investment of £21.7 billion over 25 years to support three carbon capture projects in Teesside and Merseyside in the north of England.
“It’s a landmark week in our national history because this week we saw the end of coal, the power that built this country for many years,” Starmer said, speaking in Chester, near Liverpool.
“Now … we see the new future on our horizon with carbon capture and storage, the largest program in this new and vital industry anywhere in the world.”
Britain’s last coal-fired power station closed earlier this week, boosting the country’s ambitions to become carbon neutral by 2050.
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The new investment will help fund “two carbon capture clusters” in areas that have suffered industrial decline.
The government says it will attract a further £8 billion in private investment.
Speaking at a glass factory, Starmer acknowledged the need for cleaner energy to meet the UK’s climate targets, while hoping to ease some of the pain that comes with the energy transition.
“Deindustrialization does not mean deindustrialization,” he said, assuring that “the moment is right” for the technology.
Job creation
The new Labor government launched a flagship public body, Great Britain Energy, to boost investment in renewable energy projects to meet net zero targets.
It hopes the carbon sequestration projects will create 4,000 jobs and support another 50,000 in the long term, while removing 8.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year.
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Carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) is a technology that seeks to prevent emissions created by burning fuels for energy and industrial processes from being released into the atmosphere.
Carbon is sequestered and then permanently stored in various underground environments.
According to Starmer, the UK continental shelf holds “a third of the exploitable carbon storage in the whole of Europe”.
The investment will also help fund transport and storage networks to transport coal to geological storage in Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.
While the technology has been discussed in government for over a decade, the latest announcement will see the first carbon dioxide stored from 2028.
“World Race”
The previous Conservative government had committed around £20bn to be spent over 20 years on the CCUS, but Starmer claimed the Tories had not finalized any deal or set aside any money.
Accusing previous governments of being “too slow” on the issue, Starmer confirmed that “carbon sequestration is a fight we can win”.
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Citing similar moves across Europe and the United States, Starmer said the development of carbon capture technology was a “global race”.
“This is a race, a world race … I’m really happy that we’re putting ourselves in a position not just to be in this world race, but to win,” he said.
The government’s independent advisers to the Commission on Climate Change hailed the move as “very reassuring” on Thursday. The International Energy Agency considers the technology “critical” to achieving net zero.
However, environmental campaigners such as Greenpeace UK criticized the plans as threatening to “extend the life of global warming oil and gas production”.
Last month, British climate scientists wrote a letter to Energy Security Secretary Ed Miliband arguing that CCUS is based on “unproven technology”.
The letter warned that the plan would “lock the UK into the use of fossil fuel-based energy generation until and beyond 2050”.
Source: AFP