Scots energy firm in ‘clean coal’ power station race

Plan to pump carbon gases into redundant offshore oil fields

By David Perry

Published:

Scottish Power is going head to head with Eon in a race to create Britain’s first “clean coal” power station, the UK Government confirmed last night.

The company is proposing a pilot project costing several hundred million pounds to “retrofit” carbon capture technology to its giant generator at Longannet, Fife.

It plans to pump carbon gases extracted from emissions after burning the coal through pipelines into redundant oil fields offshore, or rock capable of absorbing the carbon below the North Sea.

Eon is proposing building a clean coal station in Kingsnorth, Kent, and storing the carbon in rocks below the Thames estuary.

UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband said he would announce funding contracts for the companies to draw up detailed plans early next year.

But he also sparked a row by announcing plans for 10 potential new nuclear power station sites in England and Wales — the first to be operational by 2018.

They would produce 40% of the UK’s energy needs by 2025, he said.

Scottish Power chief Nick Horler said his company had submitted a detailed study, and labelled the statement “another major step forward in developing CCS (carbon capture and storage) technology into a working reality”.

Government sources estimated that the exclusion of sites in Scotland – because the SNP government at Holyrood has refused to grant planning consent – will cost a potential 18,000 jobs building nuclear plants alongside the existing stations at Torness in the Lothians and Hunterston on the Clyde coast.

Tory shadow Scottish secretary David Mundell said the exclusion of Scotland, as a result of the SNP’s anti-nuclear stance, was “a lost opportunity to not just maintain jobs but to create new ones”. He warned: “The SNP is more interested in its ideological stance than keeping the lights on in Scotland.”

But SNP energy spokesman Mike Weir, who is MP for Angus, said wholesale changes to planning law in England so objections can be ignored to enable nuclear plant to be built “takes Labour’s obsession to a whole new level”.

He said: “Scotland is capitalising on our vast clean, green energy potential, instead of following London Labour’s blind faith in costly, dirty, dangerous and unreliable nuclear power.”

Orkney and Shetland MP Alistair Carmichael, the Liberal Democrats’ Scottish affairs spokesman, said: “Nuclear energy will be an expensive distraction from the vital, clean-energy technologies we need to be developing.

“Scotland has enormous potential in terms of both wind and wave energy and carbon capture, which the government has so far squandered.”

Greenpeace anti-nuclear campaign chief Ben Ackiffe said the environmental organisation was considering taking the UK Government to court because it had no definite plans to deal with the toxic waste the new plants would produce.