---

Energy Bill

Before my noble friend does that—and, after all, as we are in Grand Committee she cannot do anything very much else—will the Minister look at two other problems which would justify maybe not this amendment but some other form of building greater market transparency? That was what he was asking for, and we would all support that. First, we will come to this later in the Bill, but all that I will say at is stage is that we will find that the storage facilities that exist, whether onshore or offshore, are in increasing demand for storing CO2. I do not know why the Minister looks so puzzled as there is a whole bit of the Bill about that. We have not come to it yet, but one question that I will certainly want to explore is how far there will be availability of storage and some form of good transfer for CO2 that is separated or sequestrated from fossil fuel operations. On the second issue, the Minister rightly referred to the amendment relating to onshore storage. One thing that I am told about that is that it is becoming increasingly difficult; most of it happens in salt caverns, with a saline cap over the top. They are encountering environmental problems in some instances where it proves difficult to dispose of the waste salt created when washing out the salt cavern. That is pushing the industry to look more at offshore storage because it does not have that problem. It has other problems—it is a great deal more expensive—but it does not have the environmental problem of having to deal with the salt that is washed out of the caverns. In addition, the salt caverns tend to be a great deal smaller than the depleted gas fields. The comparison is obviously with the Rough field and, in future, with the Hewett field. These problems need to be brought out into the open. Some kind of report—perhaps not exactly the one that my noble friend's amendment, to which I put my name, suggests—would be helpful. Somebody, whether in the department or in Ofgem, should provide the market and Parliament with a regular appreciation of the situation on these issues, because if we are going to have more gas storage as a desideratum or an objective, these issues need to be addressed. The market and Parliament will need to know what the Government are going to do to achieve their objective of more gas storage. We will want to come back to this at some stage. We have raised a number of issues, including the important issue raised by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. They indicate that something of this sort is going to be necessary if we are going to take this forward and increase the amount of storage. The problems need to be addressed. At the moment, I am not entirely happy that it is being done in a way that might achieve the objectives that the Government have set themselves.