Achieving carbon capture and storage (CCS) projections in UK industry requires establishing more carbon dioxide (CO2) storage facilities and quick build-out of pipelines to connect to sites, according to a statutory report published today in the UK.
The Seventh Carbon Budget is a report from the UK’s Climate Change Committee, comprising a wide range of prominent experts. It states that CCS is important for tackling process emissions and should be targeted at industrial subsectors with limited alternatives. The report also notes that hydrogen will play ‘a small but important role’ in subsectors (ceramics, chemicals) which may find it hard to electrify.
“While CCS is limited to sectors where there are few or no alternatives, we cannot see a route to Net Zero that does not include CCS,” it states.
CCS will be used alongside hydrogen to enable long-term storable and dispatchable power in the electricity supply sector, in manufacturing low-carbon hydrogen and to underpin engineered removals.
Hydrogen will be important within the electricity supply sector as a source of long-term storable energy that can be dispatched when needed, and as a feedstock for synthetic fuels, the report notes. “However, we see no role for hydrogen in buildings heating and only a very niche, if any, role in surface transport.”
Industry electrification
It has been widely agreed that electrification will do much of the decarbonisation heavy lifting while gases play a key role in reducing emissions in hard-to-abate sectors.
The report doesn’t dispel this notion, but does give more weight to the prospect that electrification will play a key role in industrial decarbonisation, forecasting that 11% of emissions reductions by 2040 will come from industry.
Within the industrial sector, the largest share of emissions reduction will come from electrification of heat processes.
Emma Pinchbeck, Chief Executive, Climate Change Committee, said, “It is vital that electricity – the fuel of the future – is cheap, this is a critical assumption in our pathway.”
She maintained that the net cost of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP on average but acknowledged the need for “significant up front investment” from government in this parliament. UK surface transport is the largest emitting sector, accounting for a quarter of emissions, while agriculture and aviation are forecast to account for the majority of emissions by 2050.
Pinchbeck said both consumers and the economy benefit from a future tied to a low-carbon economy than one dependent on fossil fuels, fuelled by the ongoing fall in the cost of renewables, adding that “poll after poll” shows people believe action on climate change is important.
Dr. Emily Nurse, Head of Net Zero at the Climate Change Committee, said there will be a role for low-carbon fuels in sectors which cannot electrify, such as sustainable aviation fuels, and agreed CCS will play a key role in capturing process emissions. “Our Seventh Carbon Budget is an ambitious yet deliverable target,” she said.
Environmental Audit Committee Chair, Toby Perkins MP, said, “Some technological advances in development now will aid in the transition, but we cannot rely on mythical ‘silver bullets’ which allow us to put off the hard choices we need to make to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate.”
“Aviation emissions continue to be hard to mitigate, and the Government clearly has a lot of work to do to boost the take-up of sustainable aviation fuels from the current mandate of 2% to the recommended 17% by 2040.”
“I would like to see an iron-clad guarantee for how total aviation emissions will be brought within carbon budget limits before spades go into the ground at the UK airports where capacity is to be increased.”
Capitalising on waste heat
The Association for Decentralised Energy (ADE) said the Government must address a glaring gap in industrial decarbonisation support, as nearly 50% of the UK’s industrial emissions currently lack a pathway to decarbonise, potentially putting 770,000 jobs at risk.
With hydrogen for home heating decisively ruled out, equally critical is the vast untapped resource of waste heat generated from data centres and industrial processes, which, if harnessed through low-carbon heat networks, could channel up to £100bn of investment into the UK economy by 2050, according to the ADE.
CEO Caroline Bragg said the Climate Change Committee has laid out an ambitious vision for decarbonisation through electrification and other technologies, but the real transformation begins with government action. “Government must now set clear, modern rules that ensure we don’t waste the renewable energy we’re building or the heat our industries produce. This is how we lower bills, protect jobs, and fuel economic growth,” she said.
With the new US government advocating fossil fuel development, and mainland Europe committing to renewables, the energy industry is becoming increasingly polarised, with both the policies and economics surrounding decarbonisation coming under increased scrutiny.
The UK Net Zero economy has grown to £83bn according to a recent CBI Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit report.
Read more: UK Net Zero economy grows to £83bn
Despite all the positive forecasts, the UK green economy is on track to be worth less than 2% of GDP by 2050, according to the Tony Blair Institute For Global Change.
“Betting everything on green growth would therefore be a mistake and it must be a pillar of the UK’s growth strategy, but it cannot be the whole strategy,” it notes.
Read more: UK warned not to ‘bet everything on green industrial growth’
