Government reassures that funding is there for carbon capture projects

The Department of Energy and Climate Change insist £1 billion is still available for carbon capture and storage projects, despite suggestions that the Treasury are taking the money to back a major infrastructure programme. Charlotte Reid has more.

Concerns have been raised that money used to back projects like Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is now being used as part of Chancellor George Osborne’s £30billion 10 year investment programme to improve the UK’s infrastructure.

But the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) insist that “nothing has changed“. A DECC spokesman told the Press Association that the £1 billion is still there to support CCS projects.
Carbon capture is a way of being able to carry on burning fossil fuels without releasing the carbon dioxide.

Instead of the carbon going into the atmosphere it is stored inside a power plant where it is purified, piped away for hundreds of kilometres, and then injected into geological storage reservoirs deep below ground where it can be kept for tens of thousands of years.

Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury, told the Today Programme that to fund the boost in infrastructure he had identified areas “where there are underspends or where projects [are] that haven’t come to fruition on the right time scale“.

Alexander explained, “For example we announced a few weeks back that the carbon capture and storage programme has been delayed because the original project couldn’t be delivered.

“We’re committed to providing the money for that but it is most likely that the majority of that money will be needed in the next parliament and so we can release the funds in this parliament for that sort of programme.”

Recently a planned CCS project at Longannet, Fife was scrapped but there are other CCS projects still in the pipeline, like the one in Peterhead, Aberdeenshire that Blue & Green Tomorrow has previously highlighted.

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Photo: Paul Jerry.