Ed Davey has lost the plot and is about to blow £100,000,000 of public money on a ‘Carbon Capture and Storage’ project. As you might expect, EU directives lie behind this lunacy. The recipients are Shell and SSE. The BBC has this:
Multi-million pound funding to help with design costs for a planned carbon capture and storage plant at Peterhead has been unveiled by the UK government.
Shell and Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) are behind the scheme to transform the town’s power station.
It is one of two preferred bidders in a £1bn competition to encourage the development of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.
The funding was announced by UK Energy Secretary Ed Davey.
The Peterhead scheme would see greenhouse gas emissions captured and transported to the Shell-operated Goldeneye gas field.
It is sharing the £100m of funding with the White Rose project at the coal-fired Drax power station in North Yorkshire.
The UK government investment will enable the proposals for both power plants to be developed, with a final decision expected late next year.
Continue reading the main story
“CCS could be critical to reducing carbon emissions at a time of growing global demand for energy”
Ed Daniels
Shell UK chairman
Mr Davey said: “We are investing around £100m from our £1bn budget to take the Peterhead and White Rose CCS projects to the next stage of development – which together could support over 2,000 jobs during construction and provide clean electricity for over one million homes.
“In late 2015, the projects will take final investment decisions, with the government taking decisions shortly after.”
Mr Davey said the Peterhead initiative “envisions a cleaner, greener future for the North Sea and will support thousands of green jobs”
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
And 200 jobs when they scrap it later.
Yeah – it is far far better to spend 100 million smackeroonies on ‘clean’ greencrappery than using that money to help those who’ve lost their livelihoods in the recent floods!
Especially since it’s only greencrappery which prevents such flood – oh wait …
Reblogged this on windfarmaction and commented:
Ed Davey, SSE and Carbon Capture. Three losers in one!
‘will support thousands of green jobs’
Paid for by yet more taxpayer and/or bill payer money. This is the economics of the madhouse.
‘the coal-fired Drax power station’
Part of it is switching to biomass aka wood chips mostly shipped over from the States.
Even the Guardian suspects it’s crazy.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/09/biomass-power-stations-wood-forests-report
Btw do we get our money back if Scotland votes itself out of the UK later this year?
Right, you nasty little green plants, we’re going to start depriving you of food. Don’t you go thinking that you’re headed for a CO2 rich utopia again, like it was millions of years ago, cos £100m of taxpayers’ money says it ain’t gonna happen – and that’s just for starters.
Can anyone get to WUWT site? I have started getting a “not found” from my browser.
WUWT: I can access it ok (UK).
Find it very hard now to read crap like this – I mean the BBC article itself not our host’s views. My background’s history, not science, and I knew all this had happened before and the world hadn’t ended, in fact it significantly improved as a result, repeatedly. So I always was a sceptic, with views which became reinforced by gaining better scientific knowledge and by every lie and scandal and all the faked and massaged data. But I am very, very weary of feeling like a sane person forced to live in an asylum.
On a more cheerful note, it will now be extraordinarily difficult for eco-zealots to avoid facing the fact that Big Oil is actually on their side, and has been for a long time, as long as there’s money to be made. Us heretics now have a perfect tu quoque, with even the Beeb saying it out loud.
oldbrew says:
February 24, 2014 at 7:09 pm
‘will support thousands of green jobs’
Paid for by yet more taxpayer and/or bill payer money. This is the economics of the madhouse.
They seem not to have gotten the memo from Spain, that every Green job on government money costs 2-3 in the external economy. So the claim reduces to “will destroy thousands and thousands of jobs elsewhere in excess of those it creates”.
The method used for CCS, which of course will save the world, must be kept secret from the rest of the world. Yeah, right! Time for another banana.
When in operation the CCS plant will use a significant proportion of the energy produced by the power plant to first capture and then compress the CO2 for storage underground. For the scheme previously proposed for Kingsnorth 30% of the produced energy from the power station was required for capture and another 30% for storage. The energy available for consumers is then only 40% of the powerstations capacity. In other words you needed to burn two and a half times as much coal to supply the same energy to the market. There’s no way this can be good for the environment.
For gas powered CCS the numbers may be better but we’re still talking about a large extra consumption of fuel to power the full CCS process. The cost for this will be paid by the consumers in addition to the cost of the investment. Doesn’tlook ike a very good business case, unless you’re selling the fuel or building the plants.
Thanks Tim Crome: I didn’t have time to spell this out last night. The whole CCS thing is utter madness. Huge high pressure compressors are maintenance intensive, expensive plant. The power required is huge, as you point out. We need engineers in government to stop this nonsense. Ed Davey has an oxford PPE degree, as do a lot of the rest of the governing elite. Clueless tossers.
When all the oxygen is safely trapped underground the problem will be gone.
Of course, they’ve already thought about the potential problems of storing lots and lots of CO2 underground. They MUST have taken into account that disaster in West Africa (I forget which country) when a lake bottom overturned and the resultant CO2 flood killed everybody (human and animal) in the whole valley!
May I suggest that Mr. Ed Davy, and all the other eco-idiots, be deposited in carbon capture and storage. In the long run it would save so much money.
I agree, the concept of carbon capture is economically infeasible and therefore silly PC nonsense.
Actually, there may be money to be made in the idea of recovering some CO2 from the waste stack. Imagine a nearby farm field productivity increase where waste CO2 is ducted and air cooled to a hemmed in field say with a 10 ft high vinyl wall to contain the CO2. CO2 being heavier than nitrogen and oxygen in the air would settle in the hemmed in field thus optimizing plant growth.
Since there would be no significant air pressure, thin inexpensive materials could used to used to make ducting and walls to direct the CO2 to nearby fields. As a capitalist, any waste stream is fair game for making a profit but more importantly increasing productivity to make a product the consumer wants at a fair value. There is no value in stopping CO2 from going into the air, but there is value in using an essentially free resource (stack waste) to improve an existing process.
@ Tim Crome says:
February 25, 2014 at 6:39 am
You sum up the madness of CCS perfectly.
We will have to create even more energy to deliver the same amount of power. When one realizes that is the effect of wind and solar as well, the madness of the AGW community starts to form a pattern.
Add to that the nonsensical non-science of Mann’s latest anti-IPCC assertions and the pattern deepens.
To see how deeply non-feasible Carbon Capture and Storage is, read ” Carbon Capture a step closer to absurdity “, by Julien Vincent on http://www.abc.net .au/the drum ,29 October 2012.
Mr. Vincent is a green activist!
“In Australia , hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars of taxpayer money have been poured into CCS and it has been a spectacular failure.Every attempt to build commercial scale coal fired power stations with CCS has fallen over.Some significant examples are the US Mountaineer project,Logannet and Kingsnorth in the UK, Finncap in Finland and Australia’s Zerogen ”
One amusing comment followed Mr. Vincent’s post-
“There was a Professor at RMIT who developed a laser that turned a large portion of car exhaust into diamonds back around 1999. I imagine a similar concept would work for large emitters .”
Although the Professor’s laser project has ” disappeared” in the years since, I suggest that the British public and Mr. Davey would have better prospects in gaining a return with it than with CCS.