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Energy Bill

My Lords, I am sorry that I am not going to be able to keep up the party banter that has so far characterised this debate. I am grateful for the way that the Bill proposes to sort out several issues relating to our future energy sources and needs and the way that they are handled. I am particularly interested in the first part of the Bill, which proposes this financial assistance for constructing up to four UK carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. I wish we could have gone down this road a lot sooner; indeed, some experts have been saying for several years, since the original White Paper, that we already know that CCS works and do not need any more demonstration projects so we should just get on with it. There is another parallel possibility, though, which we should be aiming at, and I confess that I am a little surprised that it is not contained here. I hope that the Government will be prepared to give it serious consideration, if possible, within the future shaping of this Bill. If not, this is something that we need to put down as a marker for the future. I refer, as I have done before in your Lordships’ House, to the challenging prospect of underground coal gasification, UCG for short. Gasification plants as such were promised as long ago as 2003 but, like their promised contents, they seem to have turned merely into hot air. The challenge of underground gasification, though referred to here several times, seems never to have been seriously considered. It is time that it was. We need clean-coal technology, along with renewables and nuclear, and this could be right at the heart of that. I stress the context of this proposal. Obviously we need different energy sources such as renewables and nuclear. That has got to be done, but it is probably not enough. Our own existing coal stocks, though, as has been mentioned, are massive and now largely unexploited. Those who know tell me that there is a lot more coal under my county, County Durham, than was ever dug out; indeed, some estimates put it at 75 per cent or even over 90 per cent. According to the British Geological Survey, there could be enough still down there to supply the energy needs of this country for 300 years. I should declare a belated and second-hand interest: the mineral rights in County Durham used to belong to my predecessors, the Bishops of Durham, but, after the demise of nationalisation, those rights have now reverted to the Church Commissioners, to whom were granted—unwisely, in my view—stewardship of the ancient episcopal assets. We have all this coal and yet, despite that, we are importing nearly 50 million tonnes of coal per annum from, as has been said, Poland, South Africa, Russia—