Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of investment in carbon capture usage and storage to help reach the Government's net zero by 2050.

On 27 June, a new, legally binding, target to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 came into force. This will require ambitious action across the economy building on our Clean Growth Strategy, and carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) is likely to play a vital role. Our CCUS Action Plan sets out that we will move to deploying CCUS in the 2020s, working in partnership with industry to achieve this.

We are investing over £50 million in CCUS innovation programmes, supporting innovative technologies across the UK between 2017 and 2021. As part of this investment we announced on 27 June that nine companies have secured £26 million of government funding, in addition to industry backing, to advance the rollout of carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) in the UK - a crucial step towards the UK’s net zero emissions and the end of the UK’s contribution to global warming. It is the next milestone for the Government’s ambition for the UK to be a world-leader in the field as laid out in the Clean Growth Strategy and the CCUS Action Plan.

One company, Tata Chemicals is being awarded £4.2m toward the construction of a facility to capture and utilise 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – the equivalent of 22,000 cars. When fully operational in 2021 it will be the largest carbon capture plant in the UK, removing 100 times more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than the country’s current largest facility.

Our Clean Growth Grand Challenge Mission sets an ambition to establish at least one low-carbon industrial cluster by 2030, and the world’s first net-zero carbon industrial cluster by 2040. The Mission is technology neutral but is focussed on technologies that can be delivered cost-effectively through the use of shared networks, and CCUS is one of the key technologies that could help to deliver the mission. The mission is backed by £170 million public investment through the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund.

Also supporting the mission, the Industrial Energy Transformation Fund is a £315 million fund aimed at helping industry to transition to a low-carbon future. The fund will help companies cut their energy bills and carbon emissions through investing in energy efficiency and low-carbon technologies. This could include supporting technologies that are strategically important to long-term emissions reductions such as CCUS and Hydrogen.