The Department of Energy and Climate Change said that nine of the applications to the bloc’s New Entrant Reserve funding scheme were carbon capture projects and five renewable ones.
Successful carbon capture projects can secure funding for up to 50 percent for 10 years while renewable energy projects can secure funds for 5 years. A country can submit only three project applications.
Managed jointly by the European Commission, European Investment Bank and Member States, the scheme plans to sell 300 million carbon credits under the region’s Emissions Trading System to provide funding for innovative renewable and CCS technologies.
The total funds the sale will raise could be between 4.5 billion euros at a carbon price of 15 euros per carbon credit – equivalent to 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide – or reach as high as 9 billion euros if carbon prices hit 30 euros per credit.
Carbon capture lead is “heartening”
Of the nine car carbon capture projects filed, six are based in England while four are in the Humber region. Three projects are also based in Scotland while the rest will be built in the Teeside region.
The D.E.C.C. also confirmed five of the projects will aim to deploy pre-combustion carbon capture technology – where the carbon in the fuel is separated or removed before the combustion process – while three will be post-combustion – which removes the carbon dioxide from industrial exhaust gas.
The remaining project will use Oxyfuel technology, which involves burning the coal in oxygen instead of air to produce an almost pure carbon dioxide stream that can be transported and stored safely.
“The strong level of interest received for carbon capture and storage projects in particular is heartening – it shows that Britain’s industry is keen to move forward in the development of carbon capture and storage and confirms the lead that Britain is taking in this critical technology,” Energy Minister Charles Hendry said.
“Cleaner fossil fuel technologies present a huge opportunity for Britain and could potentially support up to 100,000 jobs in the country by 2030,” he added.
To account for the recent flurry of investments in the country’s carbon storage sector, the D.E.C.C. decided to publish its much awaited CCS Roadmap around August rather than March as originally planned.
This will also give way to assess the applications of its own £1-billion funding scheme, which aims to finance the first commercial-scale carbon capture project in the country and three more projects of the same scale.
By 2020, Mr. Hendry said that well over half of Britain’s electricity will still be generated by burning coal and gas. This is the reason behind the industry’s star role in the country’s energy and climate change agenda.
Among the five renewable energy applications, three tidal stream projects are seeking funding, alongside one Scottish wave energy project and an offshore wind farm to be built Northeast of England.
