20120419_R4

Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme

URL: N/A

Date: 19/04/2012

Event: Carbon capture and storage - "there are a lot of uncertainties"

People:

• John Humphrys: Presenter, BBC Radio 4 Today programme
• Jim Watson: Professor of Energy Policy, Director of the Sussex Energy Group

John Humphrys: Carbon capture and storage - for many people, it's the holy grail of power generation. Power stations pump an enormous amount of carbon into the atmosphere, and if there's only a way of catching it and putting it somewhere where it can't do any harm, well, the threat of disastrous climate change might be averted, or at least alleviated. Every so often, we're told they've cracked it, and it won't be long before it'll start happening, but now a report by the UK Energy Research Centre says they're wrong. Not only is it a very long way off, but it may never work. Professor Jim Watson of Sussex University is the lead author of the report. Good morning to you.

Jim Watson: Good morning.

John Humphrys: Why are people - have people been so optimistic about it for such a long time, now, and why are you saying it's not going to work, or at least it probably won't work?

Jim Watson: Well, we're not saying it probably won't work, but we are emphasising the fact that there are a lot of uncertainties around the technology. You know, the parts of the CCS - carbon capture and storage - system exist around the world, sometimes at fairly large scales. But what nobody's done is put all those parts together to capture the carbon, pipe it through pipelines and put it into a storage reservoir, at full scale on a full-scale power plant. And what our report has been about is to look at historical examples where technologies have overcome similar uncertainties, to see what really needs to be done to make that happen. And I think: yes, there has been a tendency to underestimate some of the challenges of doing that.

John Humphrys: Because, putting it very, very simply, you'd have a great big pipe sucking it down - all this carbon will be sucked into the pipe, will be fed under the ground, or something, and there'd be a big hole in the sea and we'd - I'm sure this is slightly [laughs] - this isn't exactly highly technical language, but that's the idea of it.

Jim Watson: It is, yes. And because of all these uncertainties, one thing that has to be done - as soon as possible, not just in the UK but in other countries - is to actually fund some large-scale demonstration plants. And the UK's been trying to do this, it's been announced it's going to do this for at least five years, substantial amounts of money's been on the table from Treasury, so it's not like - you know, that the Treasury's not put money on the table...

John Humphrys: We're talking billions, aren't we?

Jim Watson: Yeah, a billion pounds of public, taxpayers' money is available for these demonstrations. But last autumn, the front-runner for that, in Scotland, at Longannet Power Plant, the negotiations for that collapsed. The competition to build demonstrations has now been relaunched, but it's very clear from that collapse last autumn that that one billion may not be enough. So the other thing government's got to co-ordinate, with that money, is the electricity market reform, where developers of these power plants know what kind of power price they're going to get when they get up and running. And bringing that package - particularly that financial package - together, history shows is really important, if they're going to get these technologies up and running.

John Humphrys: Right -

Jim Watson: It's only then we're really going to know if the technology works, and if it's going to deliver electricity at the right price.

John Humphrys: Right. So even if there was all the money in the world to do it with, you can't be sure that it would work.

Jim Watson: Not until you do it. You know, there's been very much a case of learning by analysis, at the moment, and you can go so far with desk studies and detailed engineering studies. Utilities have spent, you know, a couple of tens of millions on that. But until you build a full-scale plant - again, history shows that you don't really know what the cost of the technologies are, you don't know what the unforeseen technical issues are going to be, but actually our main point is that we really need to do this to know whether this technology is an option, not just for the UK but for many other countries around the world that have big fleets of fossil-fuelled power stations.

John Humphrys: But do we really need to do it full-stop, or are there other ways of cutting back on carbon, and is it really necessary?

Jim Watson: Of course, there are many different ways of cutting carbon. We have a lot of renewable options, some of which are much more advanced and commercially available now. Of course, there's nuclear power, and above all we can make our energy use more efficient. For the UK, we may well be able to meet our targets using combinations of other options. Globally speaking, that is less easy to make that argument, particularly for countries like China, the U.S., where they really do rely on particularly coal-fired power for a massive amount of their electricity. So this technology, if it weren't available, would make the whole thing much, much more difficult.

John Humphrys: Professor Watson, thank you very much.