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Energy Bill

The debate has been rather wider than I expected and has riled some noble Lords. The noble Lord, Lord O'Neill, said that the amendment should be thrown out. Some of his comments were extremely interesting, particularly as regards buying in technology from the States. However, that would add to the fuel costs for any generator in this country if the technology was not developed here. We could develop the technology here. That was one of the reasons for the competition. I am not against the role the Government have played in backing carbon capture and storage; I welcome it. I never suggested that the Bill's provisions setting out a means for disposing of carbon dioxide in the North Sea were not very worthy. I did not question that at all, although the Minister gave the impression that I had. The Minister mentioned Stern. The real issue here is that carbon capture and storage is seen as one of our main planks in dealing with carbon dioxide. I take him back about four or five years to a debate in which he said that carbon dioxide did not have a cost, which was the case at the time. However, it has a significant cost now. I was surprised when the tradable value of carbon dioxide was mentioned as I thought that was slightly wide of our discussion. However, this is becoming one of the main issues as regards energy generation. Later amendments deal with carbon dioxide being one of the main costs of energy generation. We do not object to the Government holding a competition. We realise that there were very many reasons why they took the route they did down one avenue. I take the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, that the industry was slightly disappointed with the amount of money available. In one respect that is very unfortunate because this will take an enormous amount of pump priming. I say to the noble Lord, Lord O'Neill, that to develop some of these technologies requires government money; it does not come from industry alone. The risk factors are enormous. When we are talking about companies spending, and wasting, tens of millions of pounds—as has happened, especially with BP—that is a signal which the market takes on board. If schemes are abandoned, it will be much more difficult to get others started in future. The Minister made the fair point that the market is open for any company to come forward and produce this technology. However, given the problems that have arisen in the past couple of years, you would have to be a very brave chief executive indeed to take that route, especially in the current credit market. However, I take the Minister's points on board. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. Clauses 32 and 33 agreed to.