Miliband warned over UK carbon capture strategy

London- The UK government has been warned that a competition to stimulate carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies is flawed.

Director of policy at the Institution of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) Andrew Furlong has told Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband in a letter that restricting the competition to post-combustion technologies – processes that capture waste CO2 after coal has been burnt – is a “serious miscalculation” and that interest in other potential CCS solutions, such as gasification, could be stalled.

Furlong proposed that Miliband alter the competition, replacing current guidelines with two overarching rules. He said: “First, the competition should be open to all technologies and second, the winning entry should be that which first completes 24 hours’ continuous delivery of CO2 captured from the generation of at least 300MW of electricity to an approved storage site.”

The government’s CCS demonstration competition was launched in November 2007. A month earlier, it confirmed the competition would be limited to post-combustion technologies.

However, Furlong added that the chemical engineering community believes pre-combustion gasification can play a key role in the delivery of future energy supplies: “Chemical engineers in the UK remain optimistic about the future for gasification, in particular as the most effective route to electricity production from clean coal.

“However, recent action by government has been seen as a negative signal for the technology bringing uncertainty to a number of projects that might allow the UK to show leadership in the field.”

Furlong said that government intervention on a multi-national scale is required, but concedes that the global economic downturn makes this unappealing: “A guaranteed minimum price for carbon permits would be welcome but making the case for financial intervention and additional support for carbon capture technologies could not have come at a worse time.

“However, failure to support CCS now could have a far more costly impact, both financially and environmentally, in the future,” he added.