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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment his Department has made of the commercial viability of the methods proposed by recent research and development on reducing the costs of carbon capture technology by up to two-thirds in the (a) UK and (b) rest of the world.

The Department has commissioned a study, “Assessing the cost reduction potential and competitiveness of novel (next generation) UK carbon capture technology,” to determine how the Department can support next generation carbon capture technology in future innovation programme funding and support cost reduction in carbon capture. The study will complete in autumn 2017.

In addition, the UK is a member of Mission Innovation, and participating in the Carbon Capture Innovation Challenge ^[1] which seeks to identify breakthrough technologies and research and development opportunities in carbon capture technology with the aim of lowering costs and facilitating global carbon capture and storage deployment.

[1] http://mission-innovation.net/our-work/innovation-challenges/carbon-capture-challenge/