Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS): R&D and Innovation
Research, development and innovation plays a crucial part in the roll out of commercial scale CCS in the UK. By 2020 well over half of the UK’s electricity generation will still be fuelled by coal and gas and CCS is the only technology that can significantly reduce CO2 emissions from fossil fuel power stations - by as much as 90%. CCS will also play a key role in tackling CO2 emissions from industrial processes. So it is essential that we accelerate the pace of CCS deployment as it will play a vital role in meeting our climate change goals while balancing the UK’s energy needs.
The UK Government is therefore committed to supporting UK research and industry in order to maintain the UK as a world leader of technology development for coal, gas and biomass CCS. This is necessary to set us on the right path to make CCS technology as efficient and financially viable as possible for wider scale deployment, as well as developing British technology and expertise to do this.
Part of DECC’s role in this is to support component and pilot scale CCS projects and the development of current and next generation technologies to help bridge the gap to commercial scale demonstration. This will provide us with the operating data to prove that the technology works and enable us to refine the technologies to make the UK CCS programme a success.
NEW - DECC £20 million CCS innovation competition launched 13 March 2012
Together with our partners - Technology Strategy Board, Energy Technologies Institute and Research Councils - we expect to invest around £125million in CCS research, development and innovation throughout this spending period until 2015. This includes:
- Support for fundamental research at our universities and research organisations to increase our understanding of certain CCS issues (£40m)
- Support for innovative companies to develop cheaper components and CCS related technology (c£30m).
- Pilot scale demonstrations of carbon capture technology to bridge the gap between lab-scale research and commercial scale deployment (£55m).
This innovation programme will complement the Government’s major £1bn CCS commercialisation programme which was announced on 3 April 2012.
Further information