Battleground Yorkshire

This, however, is not the only reason why the CCS experiment at the Ferrybridge coal-fired power station in West Yorkshire is important. With most studies predicting that, in a fully decarbonised electricity system, the baseload would come from nuclear power or from fossil-fuel plants fitted with CCS technology, the potential is there for CCS to play a key role in reviving and enriching the region’s economy.

With a huge clean-coal power station proposed for Hatfield, near Doncaster, therefore, and with the promise of major investment and job opportunities in the East Yorkshire and Humber areas once CO2 can be stored under the North Sea, there is much riding on the success of the Ferrybridge project.

The problem, however, is that CCS technology remains unproven. As a result, few have been prepared to back their interest in Ferrybridge with hard cash even though the Government is fully behind the scheme. This is why, when the trial gets under way later this year, the CO2 produced will not be transported away and recycled, but released into the atmosphere.

Understandably, this has aroused the ire of green campaigners who see it as absurd that a technology designed to reduce greenhouse gases is actually going to add to them. They should, however, contain their anger.

The Ferrybridge project is simply too important to be derailed by a few short-term anxieties. This may be the country’s largest ever clean-coal trial, but the amount of CO2 produced over the two years that the experiment will last is actually very small – a drop in the ocean, in fact, when compared with the volume of CO2 being released globally every day.

The most important aspect of the trial is that the carbon is captured, even if it is then released. For once this process is proven, the investors needed to carry the technology forward should begin to climb aboard. And Yorkshire’s key role in the battle against climate change will have begun.