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Energy Secretary Ed Miliband only consulted fossil fuel companies, including oil giants BP, Eni and Equinor, between the general election and the government's announcement to pump almost £22bn into controversial capture and carbon storage, the documents show.
Details of the meetings disclosed to the independent under freedom of information rules show that Miliband only met with broader members of the industry, such as academics and clean energy campaigners, after the October 4 pledge, prompting criticism that the policy around the Controversial technology was being pushed by oil and gas companies.
Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer said that while carbon capture plays a role in getting to net zero, she warned against using it “as a fig leaf to continue burning fossil fuels.”
“My concern about the number of these meetings that have been with fossil fuel companies is that the government is listening to lobbyists telling them that they should be allowed to continue burning gas with carbon capture and storage attached,” he said.
A government spokesman said ministers had a duty to meet with a range of stakeholders and have held meetings with representatives from across the energy industry since July.
“Carbon capture, utilization and storage is vital to decarbonisation while increasing our energy independence, and is described by the Climate Change Committee as a necessity, not an option, to achieve our climate goals,” he said. the spokesperson.
“The £21.7bn announced last year represents a huge success story for British industry and will support thousands of jobs, generate clean energy and accelerate the UK towards net zero.”
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology aims to take carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas linked to climate change, and pump it underground, trapping it and neutralizing its effect on the atmosphere. For it to work, the gas must remain trapped there indefinitely. If it is filtered, or not captured in the first place, its effect is neutralized.
The technology has been used since the 1970s to repressurize old oil wells and extract more oil from them. Some scientists now say it can be used to quickly decarbonize industries that would otherwise take years to clean up.
But activists say it is being used as a way to prolong the life of the oil and gas industry.
Rachel Kennerley, who campaigns against public investment in CCS through the Center for International Environmental Law, said one of the main problems with CCS is that “it is used to justify expansion, production, [and] the use of fossil fuels.
“Renewable energies are there. “There are more proven ways to reduce our emissions from energy and electricity than CCS,” he said.
The government wants to focus on four industrial sites in the UK and capture and store between 20 and 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2030. In October it announced it will spend £21.7 billion over 25 years on capture, use and carbon storage (CCUS) and hydrogen projects.
the independent requested a list of meetings ministers have had with companies, organizations and individuals associated with carbon capture since the election.
Records of the meeting show that Miliband had 30-minute phone calls with both the UK's BP and Norway's Equinor on July 7, three days after the general election, with Italy's Eni on July 31, and then met Eni in person at Downing Street on September 9. .
On October 28, he attended a meeting of the carbon capture, utilization and storage council, which included representatives from universities and environmental groups.
In the month after the election, Sarah Jones, Minister of State for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, met with the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Association lobby group and attended a CCSA event in parliament in July.
He then visited the HyNet project in Merseyside in July, which aims to produce hydrogen, a clean-burning gas, from natural gas by storing the carbon dioxide by-product. Merseyside and Teeside are mentioned as focus areas for funding.
He then met with Harbor Energy on October 2. Harbor and BP's joint venture, Viking CCS, aims to exploit a gas pipeline to inject CO2 under the North Sea.
The agreement came amid growing fears from activists such as the Center for International Environmental Law that proven technologies that reduce carbon output, such as wind and solar farms, will be sidelined by unproven attempts to extend the lives of plants. oil and gas industries.
Campaigners say this is where the money should be spent, on proven technology like wind farms, while large-scale carbon capture is some way off.
Offshore Renewable Catapult, the UK's offshore renewable energy research centre, said wind farm capacity costs between £2.5m and £3m per megawatt of installed capacity. According to the analysis of the independentmeans the government's plan to spend £21.7bn on carbon capture would buy a wind farm capable of generating up to 8.7 gigawatts of power, supplying up to 29 per cent of the UK's average electricity demand of 30.1 gigawatts .
But Chris Rayner, professor of organic chemistry at the University of Leeds, said the UK's Climate Change Committee concluded that carbon capture will be necessary for the UK to meet its 2050 carbon targets, and said the technology should be considered as part of the mix to rapidly reduce carbon output.
He said his company C-Capture designed a chemical process using a solvent to capture carbon dioxide.
“We need them all, and if wind and solar get all the money, then we have a major problem,” he said, adding that he was concerned the technology was being unfairly “demonized.”
“There are many people who are against the CCS, of course, but it is something we need and we will need public support for it,” he said.
Benjamin Sovacool, professor of energy policy at the University of Sussex and an energy policy expert, said industries such as cement will be enormously difficult to decarbonise as it was not the power generation part that emitted the carbon, but the chemical process. . of manufacturing cement itself.
Professor Sovacool said the challenge was to make CCS work in the huge timescales needed to neutralize the danger of carbon dioxide being released again.
“Once we implement CCS on even a moderate scale, we will have to implement it in perpetuity, for a duration similar to that of nuclear waste storage sites. “Alvin Weinberg, the physicist, just before he died, wrote a famous article that called CCS the same Faustian bargain that nuclear power was because of the long-lasting nature of this infrastructure once it is implemented,” he said.
Even if the public accepts this pact, there may be leaks, he said.
“You can never have a system that is 100 percent secure,” Professor Sovacool said. “CCS is one of the backbones of the government's current strategy and carries many risks.”
Kennerley said the big question then was who would pay for these leaks and how they would be resolved.
“Fifty years from now, what will happen if there is a major problem and all that responsibility falls on the government to solve it?” she said. “CO2 is a toxic industrial waste, so the best thing to do with it is not to produce it anymore.”
BP, Equinor, Eni, Harbor Energy and the CCUS Council were contacted for comment.
