Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Howell of Guildford and Baroness Maddock

Wednesday 4th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, I also add my thanks to the Minister for the way in which he has dealt with us all through some tricky times, as is always the case with energy Bills in my experience. I also pass on my best wishes to the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. We will certainly miss her knowledge and her boundless enthusiasm, whatever time of night we are here. We will certainly miss that.

I am really pleased, having heard the opening comments of the Minister, and the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, that the Government are taking seriously the issue of carbon capture and storage. I am not sure that we felt that that was the case when we began this Bill, so I am very pleased that the Minister has been able to move other minds as well on this. I hope that we will hear in due course very good outcomes from the proposals he has made.

[Lord Howell of Guildford]

My Lords, I add a final word on carbon capture and storage before the amendment is withdrawn. My noble friend Lord Oxburgh has been second to none in bringing home the huge significance of commercial CCS: this would be the way in which the fossil fuels could continue to be burnt without CO₂ emissions. That would be a great reassurance. We can look forward to the affordability, reliability and decarbonisation of our energy system.

I hope I will not strike too sour a note in noting that we learned in earlier parts of the debate that the amount of taxpayers’ money being set aside by the Government for the promotion and experimentation and development of CCS was £1 billion—that is, £1,000 million. That is the most enormous sum of money. It is rather more than the entire budget of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office—and all directed, not to the generality of decarbonisation, but to one technology. It is a sobering thought, if my memory serves me right, that under the Labour Government before 2010 there was an intention to make that figure £3 billion or £4 billion. These are vast sums.

All I would add is the thought, as this Bill goes on its way, that we at least should remember not only the importance of the climate problem—the importance of achieving affordable and reliable energy and electricity resilience—but we should think about cost. We should always keep in mind that the costs are there and have got to be weighed all the time against the objectives we are trying to achieve. A billion pounds is a lot of money in anybody’s currency, in any language, and at any time—particularly at times when we are struggling in several other areas of public policy to find money desperately to help extremely worthy causes.

With that marker to this discussion of CCS, about which we have learned as much as we have given in the debates—it is a fascinating subject—I would just end by saying: please let us remember costs as well as benefits.

Energy Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Howell of Guildford and Baroness Maddock

Wednesday 9th September 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, following the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington, perhaps I may take the opportunity of this amendment to thank my noble friend the Minister for circulating overnight the impact assessment, which we have all read with interest. It does seem to have a discouragingly large number of “Not availables” in various boxes throughout, which rather puts one off. However, I can see that my noble friend has made a considerable effort and I am grateful to him.

The impact assessment states that last January the Oil and Gas Authority began to undertake an urgent piece of work involving industry to come up with practical measures to mitigate the immediate risks that the downturn in oil and gas prices present. That is a high ambition, but we open the papers each morning and read of thousands of redundancies, talk of fields closing down and a real sense of crisis beginning to envelope the industry, as the oil price for Brent crude remains resolutely down at around $50 and much lower for West Texas Intermediate. Can we be assured that as we go through this stage and the Report stage that we have a little more meat on the description of what these practical measures are and how, as the sense of crisis develops, it is going to be mitigated by the work and the powers we are assigning to the Oil and Gas Authority? I think that a new sense of urgency is coming to the debate which may not have been the case in January or when the new authority was set up, but we now need to incorporate that as we handle the legislation that is necessary to send the authority on its way.

[Baroness Maddock (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted to hear that some noble Lords have received the impact assessment, but I wonder if the Minister can tell me how it was distributed, because it has not come my way yet.