Carbon Capture and Storage

Debate between Wera Hobhouse and Kirsty Blackman

Wednesday 20th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Miller.

It is in all our interests to stop climate chaos, and we must work together globally and nationally to find and implement adequate solutions. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage—CCUS—is the new big buzzword. As global warming is caused by emissions of carbon dioxide, a logical solution is clearly to capture the damaging gas. However, not all proposals are as sustainable in the long term as they seem. The Government have a clear favourite: to capture the CO₂ that is produced by burning fossil fuels, and to store it back in the Earth’s rock. It would allow Britain to continue extracting fossil fuels, burning them and pumping the carbon dioxide back into the seabed, where it is out of sight. That would be easy and very convenient for the existing fossil fuel industry, but not so fast. At best, it would not add to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The question is: why not put all the much-needed investment into renewable energy, which is really where the future lies?

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

I do not disagree that we should be investing in renewable energy, but why should we not do both?

[Wera Hobhouse]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention, because it is always the argument that certain things are too expensive. All sorts of renewable energy production projects, including the use of tidal energy, have been rejected because they are too expensive. There is only so much investment that the Government can make, which we understand. Why not put it into renewable energies, rather than putting it into projects that keep the fossil fuel industry going? The Government should make it clear that the aim has to be to keep fossil fuels in the ground. They should do that now and support the development of renewable alternatives of power. It cannot be business as usual for the fossil fuel industry.

However, there are more ambitious ideas that involve the capture of CO₂ that is already in the atmosphere. It would mean that we remove some of the carbon dioxide that is sitting like an invisible film around our atmosphere. The Minister will know that such technology is called direct air capture. It, too, is not very well developed yet, but it seems to be a far more future-proofed direction to go for any Government. It is the way both to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and to produce a gas that can be used to make the replacement for fossil fuels.

One of the possibilities is to combine CO₂ and carbon monoxide with green hydrogen and produce a synthetic fuel that could be used in aeroplanes. I have made that point to the aviation Minister, and I hope the Government are listening. The technology has been thought of by a number of universities, among them the University of Leeds. This synthetic fuel behaves in similar ways to traditional aircraft fuel and can even be mixed with it. It would be one solution for aviation to become net zero.

Any of these new technologies will need to overcome many hurdles and need millions in investment, but they exist and they open up the possibility of a truly circular economy that will be much more future proof. I urge the Government to look beyond short-term fixes to keep the fossil fuel industry going and to look at CCUS for negative or carbon-zero emissions as one of the great opportunities for getting to net zero.

The Government need a clear vision for the long-term future of the planet. They must be clear that fossil fuel extraction and consumption will become the past not just as late as 2050, but long before that. Carbon capture to keep the fossil fuel industry going would be the wrong decision. We need long-term, good strategic decisions from the Government.