Engineering news
The poll, conducted by ICM, asked 2,009 members of the British public for their views on a range of energy issues, and found that while 50% would support such a move, 22% would be against it.
Jenifer Baxter, head of energy and the environment at the IMechE, said the government needed to change its stance on carbon-capture technology. “Government has abandoned plans to support carbon-capture and storage technology in any significant way, despite studies and many pathways showing that this technology is vital to meeting climate change targets,” she said.
Baxter said that carbon capture and storage could help decarbonise existing power plants, and create new low-carbon plants fuelled by gas. “These results show that this sort of negative emissions technology also has broad support from the public,” she continued. “If the government is serious about providing a secure and diverse electricity system, it must focus on reducing energy demand, improving energy efficiency and introducing carbon capture and storage.”
The technology to capture carbon and store it already exists, with several projects and companies in the UK looking at storing carbon captured from power plants under the North Sea.
“It’s all eminently doable, it’s just a case really of the economics and of people actually wanting to pay for the carbon dioxide emissions reduction” said Hannah Chalmers, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the directorate of Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage. “Yes, no doubt the technology will be a bit more efficient in 10 or 20 years’ time, but if you wanted to pay someone to build it for you tomorrow there are companies that would take that contract.”
Chalmers said that carbon capture and storage (CCS) could have a role to play in reducing emissions from large industrial sources as well as power plants – particularly in areas such as making steel where carbon emissions are part of the process and can’t simply be reduced by using renewable energy. “We have an opportunity to rethink the role that CCS should be playing in the energy economy,” she said.
One potential area of progress is ‘biomass-enhanced CCS,’ where plants are grown – capturing carbon from the atmosphere as they do so – and then burnt for energy. The emissions can then be captured and stored.
The government has been taking its time to survey the landscape, Chalmers said, but she hopes that it will announce some policies to support the UK’s “active and world-leading” CCS research community and help bring new technologies to market.
The IMechE survey also found that 49% of the public thought domestic electricity prices in the UK were higher than average, compared to European neighbours. In fact, the opposite is true, with significantly higher average prices in countries such as Denmark, Germany and Italy.