What We Do – Support decarbonisation

Since early 2016 the UKCCSRC has been holding a series of regional and national meetings attended by private sector companies, public sector bodies and UK researchers to identify and address actions that need to be taken in order to deliver a CCS based decarbonisation option for the UK.

The Case for CCS

• CCS is required or the cost of decarbonizing the UK economy will ramp up to an additional 1-2% of GDP annually by 2050
• CCS brings wider benefits than are immediately apparent, e.g. clean air, jobs, low-cost dispatchable electricity
• The need for anthropogenic CO₂ sinks has been confirmed at COP21 (Paris)
• CCS is the only technology that puts quantities of CO₂ into permanent storage that are significant in climate change terms
• In order to have the CCS option available in the UK at the time and scale required it is necessary to start the deployment process now
• CCS acts as insurance against new nuclear plants not being delivered by giving a decarbonisation option for the gas plants that would replace this nuclear capacity

The Case for CCS

[divider line_type=”no-line” custom_height=””]

“Starting afresh what would need to be done in order to deliver the level of CCS defined in the 5th Carbon Budget by the CCC?”

The initiative began with a nationally focused workshop to determine what needs to be done to to enable CCS based decarbonisation for the UK in line with recommendations made by the Committee on Climate Change (i.e. 4-7GW of power CCS plus ~3MtCO₂/yr of industry CCS by 2030).

The workshop identified interesting challenges to overcome (such as the way UK carbon accounting rules mean that ‘officially’ reported UK emissions will be unchanged by power sector decarbonisation, no matter how deep) and some potential solutions (such as the similarity between the challenge of transport and storage infrastructure funding and offshore grid infrastructure funding). It’s important these are followed up as CCS remains the only technology for creating large scale anthropogenic CO₂ sinks and is critical to affordable, low carbon and secure supplies of electricity in the UK, as well as to decarbonisation in industry and other sectors.

The UKCCSRC produced this report following the workshop that outlines the main discussion points, conclusions and recommendations.

Following the initial report six regional meetings have been held which address both region specific and “typical cluster” issues. See outputs from the regional meetings our ‘Delivering Cost Effective CCS in the 2020s‘ resource page.