Yorkshire pipeline to lead world in green energy

The National Grid will this week launch the first formal public consultation into proposals to run a 100-mile underground duct transporting five million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) every year from the planned new ‘clean coal’ power station at Hatfield, near Doncaster, across eastern Yorkshire and out into the North Sea, where it will be pumped deep beneath the ocean bed.

While principally designed to serve the proposed Hatfield power plant, the pipeline route has been specifically chosen to pass within close proximity of several other major industrial polluters on its way to the coast, most notably Drax at Selby – Europe’s largest coal-fired power station.

Regional planners believe the duct can form the first part of a larger pipeline that will collect huge volumes of CO2 emissions from more than a dozen key industrial sites before they are released into the atmosphere, so finally ending Yorkshire’s status as one of the worst-polluting regions in Europe.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) remains a new technology still to be demonstrated on a large scale. But if successful, experts believe a full-scale Yorkshire-wide CCS project has the potential to cut the UK’s entire carbon emissions by 10 per cent. But funding for the planned pipeline remains tied to the success of the Hatfield scheme – now rechristened the Don Valley Power Project – which still requires hundreds of millions of pounds to go ahead.

Unveiling the proposed pipeline route, Chris Train, network operations director for National Grid, said: “The Don Valley Power Project has a vital role to play in the early development of a CCS cluster, which could help make a major contribution to the UK’s move to a low carbon economy.”

The much-vaunted Hatfield project, to build a 900 megawatt “clean coal” CCS power station at the village’s re-opened colliery, appeared dead and buried last December when the company behind the scheme, Powerfuel, collapsed after failing to attract sufficient private investment.

But earlier this year, 2CO Energy – a London-based firm headed up by a group of former oil industry executives – took control of the beleaguered project, bringing the National Grid on board as a partner to construct the required pipeline.

2CO chief executive Lewis Gilles said last night: “National Grid is a very capable and competent organisation and we’re delighted to be working with them.”

Concerns have been raised by some environmentalists, however, about 2CO’s plans to make the scheme more affordable by using the captured carbon dioxide to push millions of barrels of oil out from beneath the sea bed, in an industrial process called Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR).

Green groups believe much of the environmental benefit of the scheme will be lost if it essentially becomes a method of getting more carbon out of the ground.

“This is a technology designed to reduce global carbon emissions,” said Greenpeace spokesman Jim Footner. “If you’re using it to basically gather millions more barrels of oil, then I doubt it would have any mitigating effect.”

But 2CO communications director Jane Paxman said the recovered oil will make CCS more affordable. By working with Canadian oil giant Talisman up to 200 million barrels of oil could be recovered from depleted oil fields in the mid-North Sea.

“This is a global market, and the world is not going to use any more or less oil whether it comes from the North Sea or from Russia or Saudi Arabia.” She added: “What our EOR scheme will do is make CCS more affordable now, while providing a huge contribution to the UK Treasury in tax revenue.”

The scheme has been backed by CO2Sense, which said oil extraction is a practical way to help fund a new technology which it believes is essential to the future of the region.

Jobs hope in project: Page 7; Comment: Page 10.