Daily catch-up: carbon capture and storage – some green technological fixes are never going to work.
Drax Group Plc pulled out of a plan to build the U.K.’s first commercial-scale power plant equipped with a carbon capture and storage system, a blow to the government’s ambition to spur the technology crucial to protecting the climate. Drax will withdraw as a partner in Capture Power Ltd., the developer of the White Rose project, the U.K. electricity generator said Friday in a statement on its website. The idea always seemed like a perpetual motion machine, in which energy would be created by taking carbon out of the ground (in the form of coal) and then putting it back (in the form of carbon dioxide).
It is exploring the feasibility of capturing 90 percent of carbon emissions from a new coal-fired power station next to Drax’s existing power plant in Yorkshire and storing them under the North Sea. Drax has blamed the Government for cutting the green subsidy, but that is simply a way of saying it is too costly, which in turn is a way of saying it doesn’t work. • I have written for CapX on why renationalising the railways is popular.
Capture Power said it was still committed to delivering the CCS project and a final investment decision will depend on the outcome of an engineering and design study. As a market socialist, I don’t think it should be: “So the purpose of politics, I have thought since then, is to work with the grain of market forces – or human nature plus maths, as might be a better description – towards a more equally prosperous society. Britain, along with many other countries, will need CCS to help meet its emissions reduction targets if it is still running fossil fuel power generation plants.
The British government has committed 1 billion pounds ($1.5 billion) for two CCS projects – one at a coal plant and one at a gas plant which is being developed by Shell and SSE and which could be operational by the end of the decade. People feel that they can get what they want through government action, and do not trust the outcomes of unco-ordinated market agents: “The invisible hand is well-named: people can’t see it.” • Emran Mian has a terrific defence of political centrism in Independent Voices. After many years of research, Saskatchewan Power opened the world’s first coal-fired power plant retrofitted with CCS last year, but European utilities have struggled. The government in 2011 withdrew from talks with the last remaining bidder, Iberdrola SA’s Longannet project, saying the costs of fitting the technology at the coal-fed plant were too high.