Baroness Laing of Elderslie
Main Page: Baroness Laing of Elderslie (Conservative - Life peer)(3 years, 11 months ago)
Commons ChamberWe now come to the Select Committee statement. Darren Jones will speak for up to 10 minutes, during which no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of his statement, I will call Members to put questions on the subject of the statement, and call Darren Jones to respond to those in turn. Members can expect to be called only once, of course. Interventions should be questions and should be brief.
I thank the hon. Gentleman for the suggestion that I have any influence over the location of these sites. Unfortunately, I have to break it to him that I do not. Carbon capture and storage was an interesting debate in the climate assembly report because CCS is a little further ahead compared to other negative emissions technologies in proving its capabilities in research and scaling up into industrial settings. Assembly members felt that it was a way to slow down the action we need to take on other renewable sources of energy, and were concerned about issues such as the leakage and storage of carbon in the use of these technologies. That is why they down-prioritised it compared to wind or solar. It is important to note that the assembly was unable to consider issues such as tidal power because the research is not in the right place to be able to do so comprehensively. We quickly need to understand the capacity of carbon capture and storage for scaling up and meeting needs, but we should also recognise that we must prioritise an urgent speed-up in the use of clean renewable technologies, and in my view carbon capture and storage is only a temporary solution.
I will now suspend the House for three minutes to allow the safe exit of Members who are here for this business and entrance of those who await the next business.