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Draft National Policy Statement for Fossil Fuel Electricity Generating Infrastructure (EN-2)

My Lords, I apologise at once to the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for having intervened right at the end of his speech, but I have discovered that that can be helpful, otherwise one has to correct Hansard later. Inevitably, this is going to be a bit of a disjointed debate—I do not quarrel with that. The Minister will not be surprised that I want to pick up on one or two of the things that he talked about, particularly CCR, which I shall come to shortly. I thought that my noble friend Lord Crickhowell performed an amazing dissection of what has happened to the gap between onshore and offshore with regard to these energy terminals; I think that the Minister will certainly want to answer that question. Like the debate, my speech will be piecemeal. I make no apology for that: it is inevitable, given the nature of the debate. I will make my points in the order of the documents that we are discussing—EN-2, EN-3, EN-4 and EN-5. The first thing that one notices about EN-2—the Minister explained the reason for this—is that most of the detail and explanation is in EN-1. It would have been inappropriate to go into detail in the debate on EN-1 on 23 February, because we were discussing the wider issues. Nevertheless, it is to EN-1 that one must turn for some of the details. I turn first to the concept of carbon capture ready—CCR as it has come to be known. Paragraph 4.7.6 of EN-1 refers to carbon capture and storage as an emerging technology. The noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, said that it was like a religion, not a technology. I hope that I can reassure her in the next few minutes. I was one of a few noble Lords who had the privilege of being invited to the BP research establishment at Sunbury. I must say that it is very impressive. We were given a substantial briefing on carbon capture and storage, in which BP is one of the prime investors. We were able to see some of the amazing technology for displaying this in what they call the HIVE, a technology which has huge screens, all computer-controlled. If any noble Lords are invited there, I strongly recommend that they accept. It was a very interesting and revealing briefing that we received. Paragraph 4.7.6 of EN-1 states: ""Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an emerging technology"." That is not really true. It is a well established technology. I can do no better than to quote the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, who cannot be with us this afternoon—he apologises, but knows what I am going to say and approves. As president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association, his foreword to its brochure is very interesting. He states: ""CCS is not an unproven technology"." I will continue the quotation in a moment. We were given a demonstration of some of the CCS plants that are in operation in many other parts of the world. The one that BP particularly wanted to show us—I found it fascinating—was in Algeria, called In Salah, where it has developed a large and very dispersed gas field, which supplies gas that is piped to the Mediterranean coast, and then across either to Spain or to Italy. From there it can be transported to southern Europe. BP has a fully operational CCS plant there, on a large scale. It extracts CO2 and stores it in the depleted gas fields that it has used. I realise that this is a special case: however, it is just one of a number around the world. That is why the CCSA is right. I will quote a little more from the noble Lord, Lord Oxburgh, when he said that, ""today, we need to step up to a new level. We must scale up the technologies from today’s limited number of small plants to widespread implementation around the globe"." One of the things that became apparent from the presentation at Sunbury is that the purpose of the four demonstration plants—we do not know which plants they are yet, as there has been a huge delay in announcing them; we knew about the first competition about two years ago—is not to demonstrate the technical feasibility, which I think has been the impression and which might have tempted the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone, to regard it as a bit of fantasy, but to prove that the technology can be economic and effective in a European environment.