Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage

Julian Lewis Excerpts

Monday 7th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Ed Miliband]

This is something that my hon. Friend and I have talked about. On Grangemouth, we are advancing at speed—in a way that the last Government completely failed to do, because the project had not even started—with Project Willow, which is seeking an industrial future for the Grangemouth site. He has my absolute commitment that we will use every lever at our disposal in Government to try and make this happen. We have a number of levers available to us that the last Government did not have, including the national wealth fund, and we are going to work intensively on that in the coming months.

[Sir Julian Lewis (New Forest East) (Con)]

The Secretary of State will know that until a few days ago, the Fawley refinery and chemicals complex run by ExxonMobil in New Forest East was planning a major carbon capture project that involved controversial pipelines either over sensitive areas of the New Forest or across the Isle of Wight. ExxonMobil has temporarily pulled the plug on that, but one reason it seems to think it cannot use a sea route, perhaps to feed this in to the North sea outlet for carbon capture and storage, is the absence of purpose-built ships for the safe transportation of liquefied CO₂. Will the Secretary of State look into where we are with the development of safe methods of transporting the gas in liquid form by sea?

[Ed Miliband]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his question. I talked to the UK chair of ExxonMobil last week about this issue, and I believe that the Minister of State, Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon West (Sarah Jones), is going to meet him later this week. For the benefit of the House, this was not in either track 1 or track 2—it was part of the Solent cluster—but we want all the projects to go ahead and the Solent cluster has real potential and is an important part of this. The UK chair told me that this temporary pause was certainly nothing to do with the actions of this Government, but, frankly, was to do with the time it had taken the previous Government to get going on this. I undertake to the right hon. Gentleman that we will continue our dialogue with the company about these issues, including on the more technical issues that he is talking about.