Carbon capture capers

ClickGreen reports

The developers of Europe's leading capture capture [sic] and storage project have warned they are being forced to shut down operations after the UK Government refused to provide vital backing.

Do we know what vital backing may be? I think we do.

In July, the 650MW scheme in South Yorkshire topped the list of European CCS programmes competing for an estimated €337 million share of the €1.3 billion funding pot available in the EU's NER300 allowances.

The UK had four projects on the list but each required co-funding commitments from the UK. The pioneering Don Valley CCS project failed to win Government support despite working towards creating Europe's first industrial-scale carbon capture installation.

However, all is not lost – we still have four bidders.

But yesterday, DECC refused to support 2Co Energy, operators of the Don Valley CCS project, and selected four other bidders to be shortlisted for the next phase of its £1bn CCS comppetition. [sic].

Here is one of those four bids (my emphasis in bold).

Captain Clean Energy Project: A proposal for a new 570MW, fully abated coal Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (pre-combustion) project in Grangemouth, Scotland with storage in offshore depleted gas fields. Led by Summit Power, involving Petrofac (CO2 Deepstore), National Grid and Siemens

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has always offered oil companies the tempting possibility of earning money from their depleted gas fields by using them for CO2 storage in these crazy CCS schemes. No wonder Big Oil is not necessarily opposed to climate games, nor particularly interested in pointing out how insane they are.