ScottishPower boss talks CCS to Unite, WWF

London - ScottishPower chief executive Nick Horler has highlighted his company's efforts to develop carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, in an address to a 22 June conference on energy hosted by the Unite trade union.

The UK has the required engineering skills, the academic expertise, the natural resources and a supportive government - all the elements needed to take the lead in developing CCS technology, said Horler. ScottishPower, he added, has a retrofittable CCS demonstration project that could be operational by 2014

"The UK can lead the world with CCS technology, creating new skills, jobs and tremendous opportunities for growth, said Horler. "To help make this a reality, our parent company Iberdrola is committed to making the UK its global centre of excellence for CCS and we have already established significant CCS research projects with leading UK universities and are undertaking groundbreaking test projects including capturing carbon from our coal-fired power station at Longannet."

A few days prior to his presentation to Unite, Horler addressed a parliamentary reception in the House of Commons organised by WWF and Christian Aid where he emphasised the importance of proving CCS technology on a commercial scale as quickly as possible in order to make a significant impact on the emissions of the 50,000 fossil fuel power station currently operating across the world.

"The belief that CCS will play a major role in the battle against climate change is recognised amongst global policymakers. CCS features prominently in all the main blueprints for reducing greenhouse gas emissions,"  the CEO said at the 17 June event.

"By using our existing plant at Longannet on the Firth of Forth, we can have a post combustion, retrofitable demonstration project at 330MW up and running by 2014. The amount of CO2 removed from Longannet during the demonstration would be the equivalent to taking one million cars off the road each year.

"Proving this technology at scale and, crucially, proving that it can be retrofitted to existing plant such as Longannet power station, will mean it could be installed to an estimated 50,000 existing fossil fuel plant around the world. This would be a huge step towards reaching global C02 reduction targets and addressing the carbon lock-in from these stations."

Back at the union event, Unite's national officer Dougie Rooney described nuclear power, clean coal and CCS technology as key to meeting the UK's future energy needs while reducing C02 emissions. With the right support from the UK government, he said, Britain could become the centre for a global engineering supply chain, creating 10,000 skilled manufacturing jobs as a result.

"The demand for components and equipment from power generation companies gives UK manufacturing companies huge opportunities to expand, "said Rooney. "The government must foster the right environment for British manufacturing to flourish once again. The export potential is global and reaches out to countries including India and China. The opportunity to create thousands of highly skilled jobs in the UK over the next 10 years cannot be missed, it has to be realised."