Engineering news
Drax has dramatically withdrawn its financial support from a showpiece multi-million pound carbon capture and storage project.
The energy group, which operates the UK’s largest power station in Selby, North Yorkshire, said it was ending further investment in the White Rose carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme, claiming that changes in financial and regulatory environments had made the project financially unattractive. It would instead invest resources in biomass, it said.
Pete Emery, operations director of the Drax Group, said: “We are confident the [CCS] technology we have developed has real potential, but have taken a decision not to invest any further in the development of this project.
“The decision is based purely on a drastically different financial and regulatory environment and we must put the interests of the business and our shareholders first.”
“We will focus our resources on the areas which we can deliver best value, particularly working with government to explore the potential for converting a fourth [Drax] generating unit to run on sustainable biomass.”
The two year White Rose CCS feasibility and technology development project is being taken forward by a consortium made up of Drax, Alstom and BOC called Capture Power. The partnership is looking at the potential of capturing up to 90% of carbon emissions from a new coal-fired power station and then safely store them beneath the North Sea.
The White Rose project has received government funding alongside the Shell Peterhead project in Scotland to conduct the Front End Engineering and Design of its plant, and is due to conclude during the next 6-12 months.
Earlier this month the Peterhead project took a key step forward when geologists approved the site in the North Sea Shell engineers plan to store CO2 in.
The government is expected to make a decision on funding for one of the two projects before the end of this year, with up to a £1 billion promised available to build the UK's first commercial-scale CCS plant.
Drax said it remained committed to fulfilling its current work on the project, but once completed, it would not be investing further and would withdraw as a partner. It said that it would continue to make the Drax site, along with the infrastructure at the Selby plant, available for the project to be built.
Emery added: “We remain fully committed to completing what we’ve signed up to – the completion of a study into the feasibility and development of world leading technology that could result in dramatic reductions in carbon emissions produced by power stations and heavy industry.”
Box out: About the White Rose CCS Project
White Rose is a plan to construct an oxyfuel power and carbon capture and storage (CCS) demonstration project of up to 448 MWe gross output. The project is intended to prove CCS technology at commercial scale and demonstrate it as a competitive form of low-carbon power. It is also intended to play an important role in establishing a CO2 transportation and storage network in the Yorkshire and Humber area.
The standalone power plant will be located at the existing Drax Power Station site near Selby, North Yorkshire, generating electricity for export to the Electricity Transmission Network as well as capturing approximately 2 million tonnes of CO2 per year, some 90% of all CO2 emissions produced by the plant. The CO2 will be transported through National Grid’s proposed pipeline for permanent undersea storage in the North Sea.
The power plant technology, known as oxy-fuel combustion, burns fuel in a modified combustion environment with the resulting combustion gases being high in CO2 concentration. This allows the CO2 produced to be captured without the need for additional chemical separation, before being piped for storage.
National Grid will construct and operate the CO2 transport pipelines and, with partners, the permanent CO2 undersea storage facilities at a North Sea site.