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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what the Government's policy is on carbon capture, utilisation and storage for (a) oil (b) gas (c) coal and (d) the industrial sector; and if he will make a statement.

The Clean Growth Strategy, published in October 2017, includes the Government’s new approach to carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS), setting an ambition of deploying CCUS at scale during the 2030s, subject to costs coming down sufficiently. The new approach sets out that CCUS has a potential role in decarbonising a number of sectors of the economy, including in industry, power and heat.

Government will be publishing a Deployment Pathway for CCUS by the end of the year which will set out the steps needed to meet this ambition. This will be informed by the CCUS Cost Challenge Taskforce that I established and which will report to me in July 2018.

In parallel, Government will invest £100 million in CCUS and industrial energy innovation and continue to work with other Governments and industry to drive down the cost and accelerate global deployment of CCUS. As part of this, I will be, with Fatih Birol, Executive Head of the International Energy Agency, hosting a high-level CCUS Summit on 28 November 2018 in Edinburgh.