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    Financial Times: Carbon capture plants choked by upfront costs

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Summary

Despite £1bn offer from British government and separate offer from the European Commission to contribute to carbon capture and storage projects, companies continue to decline. With costs so high, companies shirk at offer for up-front capital costs. Governments should consider long-term funding.

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Financial Times: Carbon capture plants choked by upfront costs

It scarcely seems possible in these straitened times but for the last five years, the British government has been trying to give away £1bn to a bunch of energy companies without success.

Equally bizarrely, the European Commission in Brussels is struggling to hand out money to many of the same companies from a separate pot of more than €1bn.

The companies, which include Royal Dutch Shell and France’s GDF Suez utility, can do without the cash. Not so the technology the UK and EU are trying to help them develop: carbon capture and storage, or CCS. This is an industrial process that promises to help resolve a central dilemma of climate change: how to curb the atmosphere-warming greenhouse gases emitted when fossil fuels are burnt in coal or gas power stations without jeopardising energy supplies and economic growth.  MORE

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