E3G

Nick Mabey on Morning Ireland: urgently fund Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plants

By Nick Mabey

In his interview by morning Ireland’s Cathal MacCoille & Aine Lawlor, E3G’s Nick Mabey explains why no more coal power stations should be built in case the plan to safely store emissions does not work.

Calling the new CCS plant in Germany a ‘great if it works’ technology, Morning Ireland asks Nick what the catch is:

The catch at the moment is that we haven’t got the technology to deploy. While people are talking a lot about carbon capture and storage, they are actually building new coal fired power stations even faster. Our view is that we need to demonstrate this technology now and in the meantime not build any more coal power stations which may end up being a liability in the future if the technology doesn’t work.”

It was pointed out in the Irish Parliament recently that the Americans, in order to continue using coal to generate electricity, will make sure the technology will work, not least due to its abundance and their reliance on it.

Actually, funny enough, we think that’s the least likely outcome! The US has got lots of supplies of gas from suppliers which they consider reliable, like Canada and Mexico and their own reserves. However, in fact half of the new coal power stations have been cancelled in the last few years because of high gas prices and protests. In Europe, China and India, on the other hand, we have gas coming from quite unstable regions. We have a lot of pressure to use our coal to keep our energy security. Even countries like Germany are planning to build another 40 coal power stations. So I’d actually say that it’s Europe that’s got the biggest interest in developing carbon capture and storage rather than waiting for someone else to do it.”

In other words, “great if it works, but by no means certain that it will work?”

Yes, its not that we haven’t done everything. We have stored carbon dioxide in large volumes, transported it, and taken it out of industry. What we haven’t done is done it all at scale, at the scale that we are talking about – massively increase here on coal power plants and store it safely in all the parts of the world in which we need to store it, which is a different and new thing. This is why we need to immediately spend a significant but not a huge amount of money on testing the technology, working out how it works, doing that with China and India who rely on coal for huge amounts of their energy and they are growing very, very fast. Then we can work out if it is a real option. At the moment people are expecting at least a quarter of all emissions cuts that we need to do globally to come from CCS which is great but if it doesn’t work, we need to move to plan B very quickly and not build all the new coal power stations. So that’s why the first job is to get an answer on this technology by putting in some serious European funding, which at the moment isn’t coming.”

The interview is available to listen to online in the archives of Morning Ireland.