Clause 16
Energy Bill
2:45 pm
Martin Horwood (Shadow Minister (Environment), Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Cheltenham, Liberal Democrat)
The Minister has raised the important point of the appropriateness of the geology. That is clearly an important potential advantage for Great Britain in pursuing carbon capture and storage technologies because we have a great deal of experience in exploiting these kinds of geological features. But he will recall that it was pointed out during the evidence session that some of these geological features, such as the Miller field, are exhausted. Unless they are exploited for carbon capture and storage on a relatively quick time scale, they will be capped and lost as a potential facility. The time scale of this is critically important. If we have a regime that extends the time scale too far, we will find that that advantage from geology starts to reduce quite sharply with geological features becoming less available as they are capped and effectively removed from the possibility of exploitation for these purposes.