Carbon Capture and Storage

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I repeat the apology I gave to the noble Lord. I will certainly write to him and place a copy of my reply in the Library, with a full response to the six points that he makes in his recommendations—I have a copy of his report here and I have studied it. I also assure him that it remains a priority to work on both zero-growth and low-growth options. My honourable friend Claire Perry is committed to that and we will do all we can. As the noble Lord will be aware, in our industrial strategy we made it quite clear that we saw clean growth as one of the major challenges facing us. It is one of the grand challenges and very much a priority for the department.

[Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke]

My Lords, I refer to my entry in the register of Members’ interests. I make the point to the Minister that the report of the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, actually shows that carbon capture and storage is affordable. The fact that the Government have ignored that report—and I welcome their statement today—together with the cancellation of the competition, and now the fact that we are perhaps seeing carbon capture and storage by 2030, leads to some doubts about the passion of the Government for this aspect of industry. Will the Minister guarantee that those involved in the clean growth strategy will at an early point in their meetings in the new year look in some detail at how to move this forward? We have already lost competitive advantage to Norway, which is already in this country selling its capability with carbon capture and storage.

[Lord Henley]

The noble Baroness is right to stress the importance of carbon capture. In fact, I visited Imperial College, of which the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, was a very distinguished rector in the past, where I understand considerable research is being done into carbon capture. I hope to visit that in due course.

As for the other points that the noble Baroness made, yes, we accept the importance of this, and we will respond—I shall respond in a letter. We will continue to do work on this. As regards the cancellation of the competition in 2015, the noble Baroness will be aware that very difficult decisions had to be made in budgetary terms, which was why that decision was made at the time—and that is what we said at the time.