News
Publish date: February 25, 2014
News
Peterhead will share €121 million (£100m) of funding with other UK CCS project, White Rose (read more here). This funding enables the project proposal to move one more step forward, toward a final investment decision, which is set to be made by the end of 2015.
Director of Bellona Europa, Jonas Helseth, is pleased to see such progress being made:
“The decision on Peterhead sends a welcome and much needed signal to a Europe where CCS has struggled in an uphill battle. Thanks to such UK leadership, this hill now looks a little less steep.”
“The UK has worked to provide investor security for CCS projects, with measures such as Contracts for Difference. An Emission Performance Standard (EPS) also sends clear signals, which we hope Europe will follow. We look forward to seeing Peterhead and its partners SSE and Shell go the distance for CCS in Europe.”
Finally, Helseth pointed to the ideal location of Peterhead:
“For decades the North Sea has provided wealth and opportunity for its surrounding countries. Vast storage opportunities in depleted oil and gas fields are now set to become the next great venture. The wealth of expertise built up in offshore oil and gas industries can play a key role in CO2 storage solutions. Norway, as an exporter of fossil fuels should certainly step up here. As we say in Bellona – from pollution to solution!”
Scottish Energy Minister Fergus Ewing welcomed the announcement and also drew links to Peterhead’s ideal location:
“We have been robust advocates of CCS for over a decade now, recognising the strong comparative advantages that Scotland has in academic expertise, industrial know-how and the unrivalled storage capacity in the North Sea.”
For more on North Sea opportunities, read about work being done by Scottish CCS here.
And for more on Bellona’s call for an EU Emission Performance Standard, see here.
The awarded funding is part of the UK government’s CCS Commercialisation Programme, with a €1.2 billion (£1bn) commitment of which the €121m (£100m) has now been awarded to developing the Peterhead and White Rose projects. This first step is to enable the projects to themselves conduct the necessary planning work in order to make a final investment decision by the end of 2015, at which point the remainder of the UK government funding will be made available.
The project developers, Shell and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), are to fit the existing gas fired power plant at Peterhead with capture technology. The captured CO2 would be transported to the Shell operated Goldeneye gas field in the North Sea for safe and permanent storage.
Wednesday, April 10, 2024 | Brussels, Belgium – Today, the European Parliament approved the newly revised Construction Products regulation (CPR)...
Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.
After years of inaction, Germany is working on its Carbon Management Strategy to resolve how CCS can play a role in climate action in industry. At the end of February, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action published first key points and a proposal to amend the law Kohlenstoffdioxid Speicherungsgesetz (KSpG). Bellona Deutschland, who was actively involved in the previous stakeholder dialogue submitted a statement in the association hearing.
In the midst of a global discussion on whether natural gas should be used as a transitional fuel and whether emissions from its extraction, production, transport and use are significantly less than those from other fossil fuels, Russia has developed ambitious plans to increase its own production of liquified natural gas (LNG) in the Arctic – a region with 75% of proven gas reserves in Russia – to raise its share in the international gas trade.