Drax abandons CCS project

The White Rose CCS project was originally intended to prove the commercial viability of carbon capture technology and demonstrate it as a competitive form of low-carbon power generation.

CCS technology has the potential to capture 90% of all CO₂ emissions produced by a plant. The White Rose CCS project will have the capacity to capture 2 million tonnes of CO₂ per year for transport and storage under the North Sea.

[We] have reluctantly taken a decision not to invest any further in the development of this project

Drax operations director Pete Emery

However, Drax says it can now no longer continue to invest in White Rose because of a “drastically different” financial and regulatory environment.

Drax chief executive Dorothy Thompson told the BBC that the government’s recent removal of a tax exemption for renewable power that is sold to industrial companies had removed a stream of the energy firm’s income – making the project no longer viable.

Thompson also said the energy environment has changed dramatically in the last two years, citing both commodity prices and the slump in oil and gas prices as an issue for the company.

According to Drax, the project will still go ahead via the Capture Power partnership – a consortium now made up of Alstom and BOC.

The site on which the CCS project will be built – and which sits next to Drax’s power station in North Yorkshire – will remain available, Drax said.

Drax operations director and Capture Power board director Pete Emery said: “We remain fully committed to completing what we’ve signed up to – the completion of a study into the feasibility and development of world leading technology that could result in dramatic reductions in carbon emissions produced by power stations and heavy industry.”

“We are confident the technology we have developed has real potential, but have reluctantly taken a decision not to invest any further in the development of this project,” Emery added.

A spokesman for Drax told Process Engineering the company will now focus its efforts on converting the remainder of its power station to biomass.

Drax has already converted two of its coal-fired units to biomass, with Thompson telling the BBC that biomass technology was “the most affordable, the most reliable and the fastest move away from fossil fuels to the energy of the future.”

A report released earlier this year by the Energy Technologies Institute highlights the the “enormous potential” of CCS and bioenergy to the UK’s future energy system.

“We see enormous potential and value in developing CCS and bioenergy and the success or failure of deploying these two technologies will have a huge impact on the cost of achieving the UK’s legally binding climate change targets,” said ETI strategy director Jo Coleman.

Aside from the White Rose CCS project in Yorkshire, the UK boasts only a handful of other CCS initiatives.

Mainly, Shell and Scottish and Southern Energy’s (SSE) Peterhead CCS in Aberdeenshire and the Teesside Collective, a group of process companies who recently made proposals to develop an industrial CCS network in North East England.