UK Continental Shelf offers ‘vast’ CO2 storage capacity

This was the key finding of a 12-month project run by the ETI to identify sites under the North Sea most suitable for storing CO2 emissions from coal and gas power stations and heavy industry plants.

The ETI identified 20 specific storage sites, which it said “represented the tip of a very large strategic national CO2 storage resource potential”.

There should also be more work to further develop confidence among investors and the public on the technologies used to plan, operate and monitor safe CO2 storage sites in UK waters

Andrew Green, ETI’s CCS programme manager

The report said these sites could also service mainland Europe, with the top 15% of this potential storage capacity estimated to last the UK around 100 years.

Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) has been widely recognised by industry as a critical technology to meet the carbon reduction ambitions agreed at the Paris COP 21 meeting.

The decline in the North Sea oil and gas industry presents a number of opportunities for the development of CO2 storage in several ways, said the ETI.

A key finding of its project was that the UK Continental Shelf could provide “a vast national offshore CO2 storage resource” as the result of decades of oil and gas exploration and development, much of which could be made readily available without the need for extensive appraisal programmes.

“The results from this project have confirmed the understanding that there are no major technical hurdles to moving industrial scale CO2 storage forward in the UK,” said Andrew Green, ETI’s CCS programme manager.

“There should also be more work to further develop confidence among investors and the public on the technologies used to plan, operate and monitor safe CO2 storage sites in UK waters.”

Project funding of 2.5m was provided by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), and the report was produced by a consortium led by Pale Blue Dot Energy.

Luke Warren, chief executive of the Carbon Capture & Storage Association (CCSA) said: “This report further demonstrates that the UK is one of the best places in the world to develop CCS and that we have vast storage capacity that is well understood and can be made available at low cost."

Clarification required

But despite the clear advantages to developing CCS in the UK, he said the government had offered no clarity on the way forward in the UK since withdrawing funding last year for a £1 billion CCS competition intended to demonstrate its commercial viability.

“This is jeopardising significant investment opportunities for the UK and government urgently needs to come forward with a strategy that sets out how the UK will deliver commercial-scale CCS projects or lose out on the opportunity to develop this critical technology,” he said.