ETI launches £25m CCS research project

Greenwise Staff

22nd March 2010

The Energy Technologies Institute (ETI) has announced a new £25 million research project that will seek to develop a cheaper, more efficient technology to capture the carbon from coal-fired power stations before storing it underground.

The ETI, a partnership company between the Government and global industrial groups BP, Caterpillar, EDF Energy, E.ON, Rolls-Royce and Shell, is calling on bidders to come forward to take part in the project that will aim to get the advanced technology to a stage where it is ready for adoption in full scale commercial power stations by 2020.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a process whereby CO2 is captured from gases produced by fossil fuel, compressed and then transported and injected into deep geologic formations for permanent storage. It forms a major plank of the Government’s energy policy, which wants to see a total of four CCS demonstration plants up and running in the UK in a bid to build the first commercial-scale ‘clean coal’ power station in the world before 2020.

However, technologies currently available can increase the capital costs of a new power station by between 50 and 100 per cent and significantly reduce power output or increase fuel consumption.

The ETI says its latest research and development (R&D) project will aim to solve this problem enabling CCS to be eventually used widely across fossil fuel power stations in the UK.

“Developing capture technologies that cost less and have less impact on performance will significantly enhance the potential for wide-scale roll out of CCS in the UK,” said ETI chief executive Dr David Clarke. “This project would enable the technology to catch the ‘second wave’ of CCS implementation in the 2020s following on from the first phase of plants expected to be built between 2015 and 2020 as part of the Department for Energy and Climate Change’s demonstration projects.”

To meet the criteria for this £25 million R&D project, bids – which can be from a single organisation or from several companies forming a consortium – will have to demonstrate the approach and technology being used will be ready for demonstration in a power station by 2015 and fully operational by 2020.

Request for proposals giving full details of the project and what the ETI expects from potential bidders is expected to be released on March 31.

The ETI R&D project follows the announcement, last week, by the Government that it had awarded E.ON and ScottishPower part of £90 million of funding to compete to build the first commercial-scale CCS plant in the UK and a further £6 million to a CCS project in Yorkshire. It also named Yorkshire and Humber is to be the UK’s first low carbon economic area for CCS.

The ETI has previously announced £3.8 million of investment into an appraisal of carbon storage potential in the UK.