Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, whether his Department will be running a competition for carbon capture, utilisation and storage projects in the (a) oil, (b) gas and (c) coal sectors as well as the industrial sector; and if he will make a statement.

Carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS) has a potentially vital role in reducing emissions across a range of activities but the technology needs to be made more cost effective to deploy at scale. Government will be publishing a deployment pathway for CCUS in 2018, setting out the steps needed to meet the Government’s ambition of deploying CCUS at scale during the 2030s, subject to costs coming down sufficiently.

The Department, as part of its £100 million investment in CCUS and industrial energy innovation, intends to launch a competition for carbon capture and usage in industrial sectors. It will seek to identify ways to reduce the cost of carbon capture and utilisation and to create new economic opportunities from using carbon dioxide. This will demonstrate and provide much needed learning on the technology. Further details will be announced later this year.