Carbon Capture and Storage

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Wednesday 20th December 2017 Lords Chamber

Asked by

[Lord Oxburgh]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when and how they intend to respond to the September 2016 report of the Parliamentary Advisory Group on Carbon Capture and Storage.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (Lord Henley) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for the report of the Parliamentary Advisory Group on Carbon Capture and Storage, which the noble Lord led. Our response was set out in our Clean Growth Strategy, published in October, and I can only apologise to the noble Lord that we did not write to him to let him know. His report has been and will continue to be a key consideration in shaping our ongoing work.

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his apology. It was a little surprising not to have received a reply to a report commissioned at a time of some desperation in the former department of DECC, when the Chancellor pulled the rug from under the department’s energy strategy. The group was set up by Amber Rudd, the then Secretary of State, and the noble Lord, Lord Bourne, who was then the Energy Minister here.

Will the Minister write to me—I will transmit his reply to the rest of the committee—giving an answer to each of the six recommendations that the report contains? That we have not had, and it is not contained within the clean energy strategy. Furthermore, he will recall that the report contained a detailed and carefully worked-out time plan for decarbonisation of the country’s energy system. As things now stand, it looks as though the Government have lost about a year on that fairly prudent plan. Does he agree that this means that the fifth carbon budget will now be something of a stretch? It would be good if he could also place in the Library a copy of a new plan.

[Lord Henley]

My Lords, I repeat the apology I gave to the noble Lord. I will certainly write to him and place a copy of my reply in the Library, with a full response to the six points that he makes in his recommendations—I have a copy of his report here and I have studied it. I also assure him that it remains a priority to work on both zero-growth and low-growth options. My honourable friend Claire Perry is committed to that and we will do all we can. As the noble Lord will be aware, in our industrial strategy we made it quite clear that we saw clean growth as one of the major challenges facing us. It is one of the grand challenges and very much a priority for the department.

Nuclear Research and Technology (Science and Technology Committee Report)

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Tuesday 17th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I am sure the whole committee would like to express its thanks to the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, for his skilful navigation through these tricky waters. He guided us with great skill. I declare an interest as a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Last week, the Government published their clean growth plan, so I concentrate today on the role of nuclear power generation in clean growth. Once in operation, nuclear power stations are virtually emission-free. Currently, most electricity in the UK is generated by a combination of gas, coal, nuclear and intermittent renewable sources, mostly wind. However, as the National Audit Office recently noted, BEIS,

“expects almost all existing nuclear and coal-fired power stations, which together generate almost half of the UK’s power, to close by the end of the 2020s”.

Moreover this corresponds to a time when demand is expected to increase. There is a challenge.

Currently, the UK has a maximum electricity demand of around 50 gigawatts. With the expected increase in the number of electric vehicles, this figure will rise, but that rise will be dwarfed by the increase that would occur if our national heating shifted from gas, which it is at present, to electricity. That would increase electricity demand by something like four or five times. It would be enormous.

The most striking change in UK electricity generation over the past decade has been the astonishing rise in the contribution of renewables, largely wind. However, the wind does not blow all the time and there is no sun at night, so for dark early evenings in mid-winter when there is no wind we do not have enough dispatchable power to meet maximum demand. By “dispatchable”, I mean power that is available on tap when we need it. This is true whatever the volume of intermittent renewables we add to the system; that minimum demand remains.

Until gas generation is equipped with CCS to mitigate its emissions, nuclear remains the principal means of generating clean dispatchable electricity. The Government recognise that more nuclear will be needed and have identified a number of sites. As our report points out, over recent years there has been increasing interest in so-called small nuclear reactors, SMRs, which other speakers have discussed. The attraction of SMRs is that they are small enough to be built in a factory with tight quality control; individual units can be transported complete by road; and a number of units may be assembled together to provide any desired output, or they may be deployed in smaller groups. In principle, they can be commissioned one by one as they are delivered to a properly prepared site.

Large reactors, by comparison, are somewhat inflexible and respond slowly to changes in demand. The more nimble SMRs could be shut down in summer and, operating in tandem with some battery storage for immediate response, could prove very effective in following changes in demand at any time of year. Factory-built small reactors have been used by the navies of the world for some years. The civil requirements are rather different but the UK has indigenous relevant technical experience. The financial aspects of SMRs remain uncertain but, broadly, it is believed that after the first of a kind, subsequent power costs would be less than those of conventional large reactors.

At present there is no SMR operating anywhere in the world, and the first company to be able to demonstrate an operational system will clearly have a significant commercial advantage in what is likely to be a burgeoning market. The opportunity that we have is to re-enter the field of nuclear manufacture. In their industrial strategy Green Paper, the Government mentioned the possibility of a sector deal for the nuclear area. This is the opportunity.

There are two main questions for the Government. First, what role is there for SMRs in our nuclear future, recognising that they would fit well into a clean-growth plan that heavily emphasised intermittent renewables? Secondly, if we are to have SMRs, who will build them? A response to the Government’s SMR design competition, due nearly a year ago, then becomes urgent. The Government’s reply on SMRs is lengthy but virtually content-free. The window of commercial opportunity is open for a limited time, and further Micawber-esque procrastination is likely to consign the UK to the role of follower rather than the leader it could be.

Queen’s Speech

Lord Oxburgh Excerpts

Monday 26th June 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oxburgh (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak today about energy and the environment and, in the interests of brevity, I refer to my interests in low-carbon energy and energy efficiency in the official register.

Brexit and the tragic events of recent months will understandably take much of our attention but we must not forget the longer term. Our actions today are making the prospects of future generations very bleak, both for the people and for the plants and animals with which we share the planet and which make the planet habitable for us. Today, I wish to focus on the consequences of the deluge of greenhouse gases that is largely produced by the burning of fossil fuels and released into the atmosphere. It is steadily and remorselessly shifting our climate. Admittedly, the causal relationship is based on probabilities but it is one endorsed, I think, by every national scientific academy in the world. It gave rise to the Paris agreement of 2015, under which countries pledged to do what they could to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. True, some of the pledges fell short of what the climate scientists calculated was needed to avert the most extreme consequences of climate change but something is better than nothing.

It was most welcome that in the Queen’s Speech, the Government renewed their commitment to meeting their Paris target. That said, it is far from clear how this is to be done. In the autumn Statement of 2015, the Treasury cancelled a £1 billion competition for industry to develop the carbon capture and storage technology—CCS—that is essential if the UK is to decarbonise at least cost. At a single stroke, this removed one of the three legs supporting the Government’s energy strategy: nuclear, renewables and fossil fuels, but with their emissions abated by carbon capture and storage. The then Environment Secretary, Amber Rudd, immediately set up an advisory group that I had the privilege to chair, comprising parliamentarians and external experts to advise on the way forward. The group scrutinised and then endorsed the Government’s previous view that CCS was needed to decarbonise heating and electricity generation. The group furthermore developed a business model by which this could be done at reasonable cost. The group’s report has been accepted by UK industry and has excited considerable international interest. Formal publication was last September, but the Government are yet to respond. They said they would do so in a decarbonisation plan, which would be out in the spring. It seems that spring is late this year because we have still not seen it.

The report emphasises that the technology is available but the timescales are long, whether for building power stations, laying pipelines or transmission lines or any other aspect of major infrastructure. This means that, for there to be any hope of meeting our Paris obligations, we have to decide urgently the outline of what needs to be done by both government and industry. It is essential that this outline has wide support across both Houses of Parliament because it must be robust to changes in Government. Chopping and changing in matters such as this is a certain recipe for wasting money and failing. There is no fundamental reason why this should be highly politicised, and this House, in particular, has a good record of achieving consensus on energy matters. If a broad outline can be agreed, details can be added later, as appropriate, and industry will be able to plan accordingly, but the Government will need to work hard because they must realise that after the cancellation of the CCS competition in 2016, their credibility is low.

I therefore ask the Government three questions: when will the decarbonisation plan be issued? Will the plan address the recommendations of the parliamentary advisory group on CCS set up by the previous Government? Will the Government seek ways of achieving all-party consensus on how decarbonisation is to be achieved?