The CCS Consortium comprising ScottishPower, National Grid and Shell, has today responded to the decision by the Department of Energy and Climate Change not to proceed with the construction phase of its Carbon Capture and Storage competition.

Although Competition One, as it is known, will not now progress, the Consortium, in close consultation with DECC, has completed extensive design work on CCS technology. These designs were the result of 12 months of study into a potential commercial scale CCS project at Longannet Power Station.

The submission of the designs to DECC will allow the Government to take valuable research from the process directly to Competitions Two, Three and Four.

The Consortium submitted the most detailed and comprehensive design of a commercial-scale end-to-end CCS project ever conducted in the UK or Europe. In the process it invested more than £20 million (total spend by consortium members) to complete the investigation into the potential of the technology and had over 400 experts from various disciplines – engineering, pipeline, offshore, planning, commercial and legal -  working on CCS for four years.  This project has significantly increased the UK’s expertise in CCS and will help us to compete internationally as a leader in CCS technology.  The Consortium completed the research on time and on budget.

Speaking on behalf of the Consortium, ScottishPower’s Generation Director, Hugh Finlay, said:

“The Consortium is immensely proud of the work we have completed in the last 4 years. Our combined efforts have seen this potentially world-changing technology develop from being a concept in a laboratory to a definitive blueprint that could be implemented. 

“As a result of the study we now understand how the CCS process works from power station to storage site. This gives us great insight into the physical infrastructure that we need to support it, the regulatory framework it fits within and the organisational model of a CCS business. All of this information will be made available through DECC’s Knowledge Transfer programme and will be of enormous benefit to other CCS developers and stakeholders”.

Media Information: Simon McMillan 0141 566 4875/ 07753 622 257