Cash grants from public funds for carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) projects loomed closer today, as D-BEIS named its short list of twenty possible winners.
Clusters in Britain’s “industrial heartlands” – specifically Humberside, England’s north east and north west, plus north Wales – are the locations targeted for job-creation by the fledgling technology. Implementing it across Britain could help create 50,000 skilled jobs by 2030, D-BEIS believes.
CCUS extracts and stores carbon dioxide resulting from processes such as manufacturing and refining increasingly unextractable fossil fuels.
The departing, confidence-shredding Prime Minister’s 10 Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution established a commitment to deploy CCUS in a minimum of two industrial clusters by the mid-2020s, and four by 2030 at the latest.
The CCUS Cluster Sequencing Process is Whitehall’s route to meeting this commitment. Track 1 Clusters will be in place by the mid-2020s. They include the HyNet cluster announced in November 2021 in North West England and North Wales, and the East Coast Cluster on Teesside and Humberside.
These, plus a further two by 2030, will be considered for support under the government’s CCUS Programme. It includes the £1bn CCS Infrastructure Fund (CIF).
One asset, the North Sea, underlines Britain’s potential unrivalled in Europe for CCUS.
Feathering developers’ nests – alternatively, targeting small sums of commonly held wealth towards opportunities assessed to have favourable chances of securing public good – can be controversial in political economy.
The government is determined to see the UK become a world-leader in CCUS technology, helping to attract new private capital into the UK to develop new green technologies and drive forward the UK’s Green Industrial Revolution.
The shortlisted projects will now also be considered for government funding support to join one of these clusters, to use carbon capture technology to help decarbonise their businesses.
Read the full list of potential winners here.
