Climate change challenge presents shades of grey, that’s why we need carbon capture - Mike Maudsley
Industry matters to Yorkshire. Our canals and our railways, our striking Victorian architecture remind us every day of our rich industrial heritage, when the things that Yorkshire made were demanded right around the world.
I believe we still have a bright industrial future: one which will provide highly skilled and well-paid jobs and improve the productivity of the Yorkshire economy. One that future generations will be able to look back on with equal pride. From precision engineering to food and drink manufacturing and much more in between, Yorkshire industry remains world-leading.
The challenge of net zero emissions presents Yorkshire industry with an unparalleled opportunity and an existential challenge. Decisions taken in the coming months will dictate if our industrial base thrives for decades to come. Or not.
To reach net zero will require a wide range of solutions to cover an even wider range of challenges. Some argue that we simply need more renewable generation capacity, with the means to store that energy to use when the sun doesn’t shine, and the wind doesn’t blow.
As we decarbonise, we absolutely need to see the greater electrification of our economy – from heating our homes, to the power behind our transport, to many of our industrial processes. Yes, more solar, yes, more wind, yes, more storage. Yes, to a more versatile national grid as well. Less climate damaging fossil fuels. More green electrons.
But not everything can be electrified. Not every industrial process has a convenient electric alternative. Cement and steel for example. My sector, waste, is another with very specific net zero challenges.
For many industrial sectors, carbon capture is the only sensible and logical technology to deploy to reach net zero. As the UK’s independent climate change advisers, the Climate Change Committee, have repeatedly said: for industry, carbon capture is not optional, it’s necessary.
Every year Yorkshire produces more than two million tonnes of unrecyclable waste. To fully address this, we need to get better at using less. We need to reuse and repair far more frequently. We need to recycle more, significantly greater than the 50 per cent we achieve today, approaching 80 per cent. We also need companies to be clearer with us all about the whole waste footprint of what they do. Radical transparency, forced or otherwise almost always results in change for the better.
However, not everything can be recycled. This is not a question of appetite or behaviour or indeed economics. But physics. Zero waste is scientifically impossible. Newton’s second law states that matter (energy) cannot be continually recycled without reducing its density or quality. Put simply: in any well-functioning circular economy there will always be stuff left over; waste that needs dealing with.
There are only two options. We can bury it as the ancients did. Alongside a host of other environmental and aesthetic downsides, this always produces a gas – methane – that is 80 times more climate damaging than carbon dioxide. Or we can safely recover the energy contained within to provide homegrown and reliable electrical energy and heat. This is what enfinium does today at our facilities across the country, including West Yorkshire. Enough to power over half a million homes.
We can’t get away from the fact that our process produces CO2. You can’t electrify it. To decarbonise, we have to capture that carbon and (again) the Committee on Climate Change agrees.
This also unlocks a tantalising opportunity. If you capture CO2 produced from materials that are biogenic, that have absorbed carbon as they have grown – wood, food, paper and the like – you create negative emissions, or carbon removals. You are pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is essential to achieve net zero (it’s net - not absolute - zero for a reason).
The UK government has previously said that we would need around 90 million tonnes of carbon removals to achieve net zero. Yorkshire could deliver a significant chunk of this.
Despite what some claim, carbon capture is not just promising in theory. It works in practice and has been doing so at locations around the world since the 1970s. Originally used to help with the extraction of crude oil, the feasibility of large-scale carbon capture and storage was demonstrated in the 1990s. Today the UK is just one of a number of countries building carbon capture networks at industrial scale – including the Viking project off the coast of the Humber.
At Ferrybridge, in a UK first, we have been running a pilot since September proving the viability of carbon capture on an energy-from-waste facility.
Many of the claims about carbon capture – being expensive, energy and resource intensive and risks of under-performance – were exactly the same levelled at other green technologies in the past. The fact is, the more we do of something, the better we get and the lower the overall cost. The Government should be applauded for the commitment and investment it is making in carbon capture. It is unlocking outside investment and will continue to do so. Research has identified that accelerating deployment of carbon capture and storage in the UK could secure around £40bn of inward investment by 2030. With the appropriate support from the government, enfinium will invest around £1.7bn across our UK sites, almost half here in Yorkshire.
The commitment of the UK government, our deep engineering and industrial expertise and heritage, and our unique geology means Yorkshire has the opportunity to become a world leader, in carbon capture and carbon removals.
Mike Maudsley is the CEO of Enfinium.