Carbon storage ‘could be as big as North Sea oil’

A MASSIVE new industry storing carbon emissions underground off the Yorkshire coast has the potential to be “at least as large” as the North Sea oil sector, scientists have said.

Dr Ward Goldthorpe, head of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) at the Crown Estate, told MPs the depleted undersea oil and gas fields off Britain’s eastern coast have enough space to store the UK’s entire carbon output for the next 350 years. He suggested space could be sold to landlocked European countries to offset their own CO2 emissions in the coming years.

“In an industrial or economic sense, the potential for providing a CO2 storage service to the rest of Europe is at least as large as the North Sea oil and gas industry,” Dr Goldthorpe told the Commons energy committee. “We see the storage potential in the North Sea as a vital resource,”

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The Crown Estate, which owns the seabed around the UK on behalf of the country, is working with the National Grid on plans to use the North Sea oil fields for storing the greenhouse gas.

CCS remains a fledgling technology, but experts are increasingly confident of their ability to capture carbon emissions from power stations and heavy polluters before they are released and store them safely underground.

Britain’s first two CCS projects in Yorkshire – clean coal’ power stations at Drax, near Selby, and Hatfield, near Doncaster – hope to be up and running before the end of the decade, using a shared pipeline to pump CO2 out into the North Sea.

Dr Stuart Haszeldine, professor of CCS at Edinburgh University, said there may be far more space below the sea bed than the UK actually needs.

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“There is a prospect that there is 70bn tons worth of storage beneath the UK continental shelf in the North Sea,” he said. “That would translate into 350 years of storage of UK emissions at the present rate. It is a giant resource either for the UK, or to be offered to Europe to help with European decarbonisation.”