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Energy Bill

I intervene to clarify one or two issues. I declare an interest as president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association. First, to comment on the question by the noble Lord, Lord Woolmer, the possibility of storage of CO2 on the deep sea floor has been recently floated by respectable international scientists, simply because they were concerned at the slow pace of the proceedings with the rest of the sequestration proposals, such as saline aquifers and appropriate traps under the sea. It only becomes practicable to store CO2 on the ocean floor at considerable depth. It becomes denser than sea water at depths of about 3,000 metres, so you must have that sort of depth before you can put in CO2 and it will sink to the bottom. The proposal is that it would pool. However, that is clearly precluded by the present law of the sea. It would require a really significant change in international opinion for that to happen. We have none of those depths within the UK jurisdiction, so it is not really relevant to our problem. In terms of land storage, which the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, raised, the reason why not much attention has been given to that in the UK so far is that it is pretty expensive by comparison with disposing under the North Sea. All the attention so far has been directed at the North Sea where, in a number of cases, there is a possibility of secondary oil recovery to reduce costs. I simply do not know what the licensing procedure would be for storing CO2 in repositories on land in saline aquifers in the UK. I do not know whether the Minister knows that.