Part of Energy Bill [HL] - Committee (1st Day) – in the House of Lords at 5:15 pm on 5 September 2022.
The Bill is intended to establish an economic means of support for geological formation. Of course, I commend the company referred to by the noble Baroness, which is managing to find ways of—I hope—permanently storing carbon dioxide in a form other than geological formation; indeed, there are other potential support mechanisms that could be deployed towards that. There is lots of research and development funding through UKRI and there is a whole range of other advanced technologies that we are supporting. In this case, in relation to economic regulation, the market mechanism that we want to set up on CCUS is dedicated principally towards geological long-term storage; we think that is the area that needs support under this system. That would provide the vast majority of storage that we can envisage at the moment but, of course, we are always willing to consider other methods. If this company is proving to be a success, that is great and I would be very happy to look at alternative ways of supporting it.