Clause 20
Energy Bill
12:00 pm
Steve Webb (Chair of the Election Manifesto Group, Cross-Portfolio and Non-Portfolio Responsibilities; Northavon, Liberal Democrat)
I would like to address my remarks to new clause 7, which is a very simple one. It says that where there is a competitive process related to carbon capture, the Secretary of State’s approach should be technology-neutral. That is what we are driving at. I anticipate that the Minister will accept our amendment because of something he said earlier this morning. When he was talking about alternative strategies for carbon reduction, he said that choice of technology is a matter for companies to determine. I wrote it down as quickly as I could and the record will bear me out, but perhaps the Minister will correct me if am misquoting him. He said that in the context of the energy mix and the best strategy for reducing CO2 and I agree with him.
That is consistent with our new clause, which says that there are three main approaches to carbon capture and storage. The hon. Member for Bolton, South-East ran through this so I will not go over it again at any length, but we have talked quite a lot about post-combustion technology and pre-combustion technology, and rather less interestingly—I would be interested to hear the Minister’s view on this—about oxyfuel combustion, in which the fuel is burnt in oxygen rather than air.
It seems to us that there are three possible technologies that could have been a source of competition and a range of approaches that the Government could have taken. One is that they could have said, “Our goal is reducing CO2 emissions through some method of carbon capture. We will therefore invite submissions from anybody who can do this by any means. We will evaluate them against each other—both within technologies and between technologies—and the one that seems to give us the most bang for our buck is the one we will go for”.
Therefore, there is a one-competition approach. The Minister, in his gently mocking manner, suggested that we were calling for four or five competitions. There is a one-competition answer to this, which is simply that, if public money is to be spent and the Government feel that they do not have the money for more than one technology, at the very least different technologies will be allowed to compete against one another—and may the best carbon capturer win.
That would have been one way. Another way, as we suggested at the previous sitting of the Committee, would have been to have had separate competitions for the different technologies. If the Minister’s argument, as I understand it, is that, like oranges and apples, they cannot be compared, then perhaps there could have been separate competitions. We have suggested that what Ofgem regards as the windfall profits of the energy companies might have been a source of revenue to fund additional competitions. We are not prescriptive about it but, given the importance of the matter, it might have been a better way of doing things.
The Minister has said that this is potentially one of 12 EU-wide demonstration projects. To be fair to him, the Government deserve some credit for trying to take the process forward. I hope that he will update the Committee on where he thinks the other 11 are up to. The Minister shrugs his shoulders worryingly.