Infrastructure Bill [HL]

Lord Bishop of Chester Excerpts

Monday 10th November 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jenkin of Roding (Con)]

My Lords, I have some sympathy with the noble Baroness’s amendment. It has always seemed to me that if you are to have an effective carbon capture and storage policy, and if it is to be developed from the two projects which the Government are currently financing, it would make sense eventually to have what one might call a grid for the CO₂ that would be separated as a result of the technology. Each individual power station developing its own method of disposing of its CO₂ would not seem to me to be sensible.

However, we are at a very early stage in developing this technology. Yes, there have been other examples of a technology being worked in other countries. A number of noble Lords were in a party that I joined a year or two back when we went down to see the BP research establishment at Sunbury. We were given what I found a completely fascinating account of how carbon capture and storage has been operated in a large BP gas field in Algeria, with gas deposits spread over about 20 miles or more coming up to the collection point and the carbon capture and storage technology being applied and the CO₂ going straight back down to the deposits from which the gas had been extracted. The gas, now free of CO₂, was piped to the coast where it was delivered to markets.

I completely understand that that is a unique situation, but there are other examples in other parts of the world where the technology is working, and one hopes that this will be possible. If we are going to have to rely on fossil fuels—as I believe we will—for at least the next three decades or perhaps more, it seems desirable, if we can, to develop an economic method of carbon capture and storage so that it can be done without necessarily increasing the carbon that has to be discharged into the atmosphere.

I say this with some hesitation as the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, is sitting opposite and knows, I suspect, 10 times more about this than most of the rest of us. Nevertheless, the Government’s policy of having pilot projects and supporting them with the support of the industry is the right way ahead. It may well be that if this can be developed it will be necessary at the same time to develop a coherent system for disposing of the CO₂ that is discharged from the plant. I shall be interested to hear from my noble friend on the Front Bench about whether this needs a change in the law. It seems to me that something along these lines may eventually be necessary, and I hope that perhaps the Government will recognise that in due course.

[The Lord Bishop of Chester]

My Lords, can I ask the Minister when she responds to comment on two points? First, if we are now to be committed in this legally strengthened way to the maximum economic exploration of our oil and gas reserves, how do the Government see that to be compatible with the commitment under the Climate Change Act to reduce our emissions to only 20% of the 1990 level by 2050 without also having a strategy for carbon capture and storage, which I think lies behind the amendment?

Secondly, the amendment refers to the economic extraction of our hydrocarbons—I have never yet heard any reliable estimate of what the additional cost will be of having carbon capture and storage on a typical power station, be it a coal station or a gas station. What level of increase per kilowatt hour—in a unit that can be easily understood—is anticipated if carbon capture and storage is required on such stations? That impacts on what is economically recoverable.

[The Earl of Caithness (Con)]

My Lords, I have a question for my noble friend on the Front Bench arising from my work not long ago on carbon capture and storage. It concluded that every situation would be different and that it would depend not only on the oil wells but on the businesses trying to do this work. Some businesses might be able to pool their resources, and while it might be possible to set up a grid in a certain area, it might not be in another. Would not the amendments as proposed make that much more difficult? As my noble friend Lord Jenkin has reminded us, we are at a very early stage in CCS and the technology is not yet fully proven. An awful lot of work still has to be done, so to put something like this on to an industry which is in its infancy will surely cause more problems than it will solve.