Amendment 8

Part of Energy Bill [HL] - Committee (1st Day) – in the House of Lords at 4:45 pm on 5 September 2022.

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Photo of Baroness Worthington Baroness Worthington Crossbench 4:45, 5 September 2022

My Lords, I will speak very briefly in support of Amendment 14 and reiterate the question of why there may be inconsistent definitions of storage in the Bill.

In my time exploring carbon capture and storage over the years, I have become somewhat cynical about its ability to scale. The sheer cost of it and the presence of alternatives that may be cheaper and more secure mean that its role will be relatively limited. I am sure that it will play a role, but only if we enable it to be pursued in its widest possible senses. It is absolutely the case that you can store large volumes of carbon dioxide underground; we have aquifers and other underground storage facilities that could be used for this, including in the North Sea and on land, and we should explore those where they make sense. However, there are other mechanisms through which you can enable the use of other stored forms of carbon. Novel techniques are coming to market now involving plasma torches, which, applied to natural gas streams, deliver pure streams of hydrogen plus black carbon. That black carbon can then be used as a manufacturing commodity. Therefore, it would be foolish of us not to include that as a potential option. Similarly, CO2 is used as a binding agent in the production of building materials. In fact, currently the CO2 has to be bought at an extortionate rate, so using pure waste streams of CO2 for the production of building materials will again be a permanent form of storage and it should be supported in the Bill. I fully support this amendment.