Clause 16
Energy Bill
3:45 pm
Steve Webb (Chair of the Election Manifesto Group, Cross-Portfolio and Non-Portfolio Responsibilities; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
I am more than happy to be bound by your strictures on that point, Mr. Amess.
Without referring to the intervention, the general, important point remains. That point is that the difference between our approach and the Minister’s is that the Government say that they will put public money into one technology but not another; they hope that the private sector will fund the other. That is essentially the Government position, rather like how they hope that the private sector will do something about fuel poverty instead of the Government making it do something. The same issue applies to carbon capture and storage. The Government could—via a mechanism that we might consider—make the private sector do those things or threaten it with some penalty if it did not, but they have not chosen that route. This section of the Bill and this set of technologies are so vital and Mr. Burke, the expert witness, said powerfully that if we did not get it right, we would be in real trouble. My worry is, therefore, about the Government picking one technology over another.
I want to ask the Minister about another closely related aspect and that is the work—which the Minister mentioned—that the Government are doing in co-operation with China. That work is the UK-China near-zero emissions coal project with which I am sure he is very familiar. I do not know whether he was on the plane with the Prime Minister when he went to China; I do not know whether he gets to go on those jaunts.
My understanding is that the EU and China are working together on a near-zero emissions coal agreement, which incorporates demonstrating and building carbon capture and storage technology in China. I wonder how that squares with what the Minister says. I am not suggesting it is inconsistent—I think it is great. The Minister seems to be saying that we need that approach in the UK because we can sell it to the Chinese, but are we not already working jointly with the Chinese, separately on the demonstration projects that he talked about? How do those two things fit together? Does he know—I do not—which CCS technologies are being considered for the UK-China near-zero emissions coal project? I think that somebody in the room probably does, which is a help. Can he clarify how all of those things fit together?
My specific question on the clause is: we are doing a whole section just on CO2; are there other gases that we would want to bring in at some point, and could we be doing that now rather than having to legislate again? My general contextual question is to try to stress that our view is that although competition and public money are welcome, the scale of the problem means that picking one technology and putting all the public’s eggs in that basket with no public money in the other basket is profoundly mistaken.