Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee

Richard Thomson Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Darren Jones]

I thank the hon. Lady for her kind words and her pledge of support on behalf of the Liberal Democrats for the call for cross-party consensus on tackling climate change, which the Labour party also supports. On her question about the most immediate action, this autumn and winter is the most important period of time in dealing with this issue; not only do we have to borrow and spend significant amounts of money due to the economic consequences of the pandemic, but we are also waiting for key policies from the Government—from the energy White Paper to the net zero review, through to the Treasury review on green finance, the heating in buildings regulations and so many other things that are all due to come together in the next few months. Now is the opportunity for the Government to bring all that together and to set out a progressive set of policies to meet the scale of the challenge, which I am sure will be in line with the principles of the climate assembly report.

[Richard Thomson (Gordon) (SNP)]

The report expresses some concerns over the potential robustness of carbon capture and undersea storage, although not perhaps as a way of achieving the transition to net zero. In 2019, the then Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee said that it did not believe that the UK would be able to meet its Paris obligations without applying CCUS. Does the hon. Member think that this remains the case or does he agree that the UK should continue to pursue this technology over three or four sites, and would he agree that one of those should be at St Fergus in the north-east of Scotland?

[Darren Jones]

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.