Another question mark on carbon

May 23 2008 by Dave Black, The Journal

CARBON-REDUCING measures for a £2bn coal-fired power station planned in Northumberland have been called into question by another leading environmental organisation.

Energy company RWE npower says its new clean-coal plant in Cambois would be carbon-capture ready – meaning it could be retro-fitted with special technology to greatly reduce harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Now conservation charity WWF says that promising to install the unproven technology at some point after new generating plants have been built and are operating is not good enough.

It says the Government must act to ensure that no new coal-fired stations are built in the UK until carbon-capture technology has been proved to work on a large scale, and can be installed right from the outset.

WWF’s comments – which follow research it commissioned from Edinburgh University’s Scottish Centre for Carbon Storage – echo similar concerns about carbon-capture and storage technology (CCS) voiced by Royal Society scientists and Greenpeace campaigners.

It is feared CCS will for decades be unable to play any significant role in cleaning up power station emissions – an unacceptable climate risk, critics say.

RWE npower is still involved in a scoping exercise before deciding whether to press ahead with plans to build the carbon-capture-ready plant on the site of the old coal-fired Blyth Power Station.

Yesterday Keith Allott, head of climate change at WWF-UK, said the Edinburgh University research showed that current claims about CCS readiness did little more than refer to the need for new power plants to leave space on the site for CCS equipment to be fitted later.

“There’s no deadline for conversion to full-scale CCS, let alone any guarantee that this would then be met,” he said.

“Building new coal stations now and hoping that CCS will come along later is creating unacceptable risks for both the climate and the taxpayer.

“Once unabated coal-fired stations are built, the power sector will undoubtedly press for continued operation in order to keep the lights on, or demand that the Government picks up the bill for any retro-fitting.”

Last night a RWE npower spokeswoman said no decision had been made yet on whether to build a new coal-fired plant at Cambois, but the company was playing a leading role in the development of CCS technology.

“We concede that proving this technology is a long way off and that the timescale is longer than that in which the country will need new generating capacity. We are trying to balance the need to keep the lights on with environmental concerns,” she added.

Technology not tested

CARBON capture and storage is a process for trapping CO2 gas and transporting it to underground geological storage sinks, with the result that harmful emissions from new coal-fired plants would be greatly reduced.

However, CCS technology has yet to be demonstrated on a large- scale power plant anywhere.

As a result, new coal plants such as that proposed in Northumb- erland are currently described as capture-ready at the construction stage, with the intention of retro-fitting CCS at a later date once its financial and technical feasibility has been established.

RWE npower says any coal-burning plant at Cambois would be 22% cleaner than its predecessor.