The British government said on Friday that it would back two large proposals to capture carbon dioxide emissions from industrial plants and bury the gas beneath the Sea of Oman. The government, which is led by the Labour Party, said it would provide £22 billion for such plans over 25 years as part of its efforts to make Britain a leader in a growing technology known as carbon capture and storage.
Carbon capture is considered a useful tool to tackle climate change but is also viewed with skepticism by some environmental groups, which fear it will prolong the use of oil and natural gas. While carbon capture has been around for decades, the technology is expensive and has been slow to gain traction. The two proposals in Friday’s announcement are in industrial zones at Teesside in Northeast England and near Liverpool in the Northwest.
The government said the plans would create 4,000 jobs and support 50,000 others. The Labour Party, which won a landslide victory in a general election in July, hopes to use clean energy to attract investment and strengthen what has been a sluggish economy. The announcement precedes an international investment summit meeting that Britain is planning to convene this month.
“Today’s announcement will give industry the certainty it needs,” Britain’s Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, said in a news release. The government support will “help deliver jobs, kick-start growth and repair this country once and for all,” he added.
“It shows the government is committed and moving forward,” said Bassam Fattouh, director of the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, a research organisation.
The government offered little detail on how these plans would work or the strength of its commitment. The previous government, led by the Conservative Party, had talked about spending similar sums on carbon capture.
All the proposals that received government backing on Friday are led by old-line energy companies with extensive investments in Britain. One in the Teesside area is being orchestrated by BP, the London-based energy giant. The other is headed by Eni, an Italian energy company that has interests in oil and natural gas as well as offshore wind in Britain. The Eni-led plan would bury the carbon dioxide in natural gas fields in Liverpool Bay.
The idea is to sweep up the emissions from polluting industries like electric power or cement plants and bury them in rock formations under the sea. The hope is that as these businesses gain scale, the costs and the amount of government support needed will fall. When up and running, these projects could store 8.5 million metric tonnes a year, the government said.
The British government also hopes that as climate regulations tighten, the availability of a carbon dioxide collection service will attract new industrial investment and encourage owners to keep existing plants open. The proposal “essentially uses taxpayer money to subsidise the continued lifespan of the fossil fuel industry,” Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, said in a statement. The group added that the government would be better off supporting home insulation projects.
Some energy experts say carbon capture has a role to play in the huge task of reducing emissions, especially from some highly polluting industries like cement and steel. Carbon capture and storage “is an important part of the technology portfolio for meeting Net-Zero ambitions,” Mathilde Fajardy and Carl Greenfield, analysts at the International Energy Agency, wrote this year.
More than 50 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide is being stored a year, the International Energy Agency estimates, well short of the 1 billion tonnes a year that the agency says should be reached by 2030 to help reach climate goals.
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