Comment

Britain's lost opportunity to protect the planet

Robin McKie
Sunday June 17, 2007
The Observer

It is one of the strangest-sounding ideas for saving the planet: convert the world's reservoirs of fossil fuel into their main chemical components, carbon dioxide and non-polluting hydrogen. Burn the latter to make electricity while burying the carbon dioxide underground. Millions, possibly billions, of tonnes of climate-changing carbon could be stored in old oil fields and sediment layers deep below the seabed. Homes and factories could then continue to burn oil and gas with impunity.

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And lest you think the idea is cranky, take note: Carbon Capture and Storage, as it is known, is backed by many scientists. The technology is straightforward, yet could ward off the worst effects of greenhouse warming. Even politicians, including Gordon Brown, have given support. Carbon storage could not only help the world, it could aid Great Britain plc. Develop expertise and hardware and we could sell them to China, India and other developing nations, and so make money while saving the world.

That's the theory. Sadly, the practice is proving trickier. The UK's only carbon storage project has just been axed by BP, which says the government reneged on key support for it. Now fears are growing that Britain - which has abandoned leads in nuclear and wind energy technology - is about to follow suit with other renewable energy schemes, including wave power and tidal energy. A golden opportunity - to develop technologies that will be desperately needed in our overheating world - is being lost.

BP and its partners had planned to extract carbon dioxide from natural gas used in a power station to be built at Peterhead then pump it under the North Sea into its Miller oil field. Production there is due to come to an end this year, but by forcing in carbon dioxide, extra oil reserves could be squeezed out. More importantly, two million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year could be pumped down there and stored for 10,000 years.

'It was ideal,' says Edinburgh University's Professor Stuart Haszeldine. 'Miller production was ending and its pipes and valves are carbon dioxide resistant because Miller oil is rich in the gas. You only had to convert natural gas into hydrogen, burn it at Peterhead's power station and pump leftover carbon dioxide into the Miller field.'

By spring, BP had spent £50m on the £500m project. Then the government decided that all carbon storage schemes had to compete for funding and tax relief, the winner to be picked around 2010. The reasoning behind this pronouncement is unclear, but the effect was immediate. Asked to maintain pumps, pipes and platforms for three years in a dead oil field, BP promptly dropped the Miller project and is now looking to the US and Australia to launch such schemes.

It is a thoroughly dispiriting development. Plans for all other UK carbon projects - a total of 11 have been proposed, including schemes at Tilbury, Blyth and Teesside - are far less advanced than the one at Miller. None has specific sites for storing their carbon, for example.

'It will be about 2015 by the time we get one of these schemes fully under way,' adds Haszeldine. 'Yet the Miller project could have been in full swing by 2010. The lessons learnt from it would have given us a huge start in this technology,'

Of course, our mandarins' lack of technological nous in energy matters is not new. Britain built the world's first civil atomic reactor, but so bungled subsequent nuclear plans that it will be forced to import US and French technology to build the half dozen new reactors the government wants to build in the next decade. More recently, Britain let Germany and Denmark take major leads in the development of modern wind turbines, despite being a windswept island ideally suited to this technology.

Of course, with our North Sea oil expertise and reliance on fossil fuels, we are also perfectly placed to exploit carbon storage schemes - but seem bent on frittering away that lead (though there is still time to rescue the Miller project if civil servants act quickly enough). The issue is particularly vexed in Scotland, which has most to gain from new energy schemes but is being constrained by decisions made in England.

That leaves wave and tidal power, where is the news is not too gloomy. 'We have a number of very promising projects and a reasonably amount of government money - about £60m - to develop the best schemes,' says renewable energy expert Professor Ian Bryden of Edinburgh University. 'It's enough, provided we don't fritter it away on poor projects - and I worry we might do that.'

If we let Miller go, we will leave ourselves with one last hope in developing a key new carbon-free means of generating power: the power of the waves and tides. How can we be sure we won't fumble the pass once more?

Comments

contractor000

June 17, 2007 3:23 AM

The idea sounds lovely: Take all the carbon from our fossil fuel addiction, and lock it underground.
Have you any idea how much energy that takes? It means removing gasses from power stations, compressing it, and pumping it back inderground hundreds or thousands of kilometers away in the empty oil pockets it came from.

Similarly: "Carbon offsetting" where you balance emitted CO2 as above, or methane, or NOx, or other greenhouse gasses by planting forests only works if you can plant forests where none existed before.
That does not mean planting trees in an existing forest - which is in equilibrium and supporting as many trees as possible.

It means clearing land to plant trees. Which, in short, means removing crops, or demolishing cities. Is that what you propose?

So, Robin, you're completely missing the point:
The only answer is to convert to renewable energy sources (Solar, wind, tidal, hydroelectric, geothermal - quite a few options).

Carbon offsetting is a pipedream.

Proposed by those industries who cannot do otherwise than burn fossil fuels, and sell us worthless tickets saying they'll "offset the emissions".

Stop this fraudulent nonsense!

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cheasman

June 17, 2007 3:55 AM

Wright On contractor000!
Carbon credits - bogus! Collect $200 when you pass go?
BP's potential investment is a pittance - there is obviously more than meets your eye.

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Malchemy

June 17, 2007 4:07 AM

Here is a much easier solution i.e. Re-forestation of all temperate and sub/tropical land that is practicable even if it means creating irrigation systems for them(simpler to build than a CO2 separation and gas pumping station). Replacing the lost forests will help re-create the lost water sheds of the Med and Middle East and perhaps make Libya and Tunisia the bread basket of Southern Europe once again. Climate and vegetation are intrinsically linked with the feedback running in both directions. It was all those naval battles in the Med that made the land so brown today as they chopped all the big trees down and that caused the water sheds to move away leaving the north coast of Africa as we know it. Not chopping down the rest of the Amazon/Borneo/Indonesian rain forests would be good too!

Remember that the national symbol of the Lebanon is the Cedar tree!

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