Part of Energy Bill [HL] - Committee (1st Day) – in the House of Lords at 5:45 pm on 5 September 2022.
My Lords, I hope the Minister will forgive me for not understanding some of this, because it has raised a number of questions in my mind. If the CO2 is put, say, under the sea—as we have been talking about—who actually owns the CO2 once it has gone there? Who is liable for it and who has the legal right to the storage area itself? Given that most of these are created from the oil and gas that has been extracted, does that belong to the lease of the fossil fuel company that extracted them and does that last for ever? I do not understand how this works and where the liabilities land.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, if an organisation says, “I don’t want to do this any more”, there is no obligation for anybody else to take it on—so there will be a legal limbo. Perhaps the Minister could explain how this licensing works within that context. It seems to me that the Crown Estate will come into this somewhere, but maybe the Minister could enlighten me. I apologise again, because I should know the answer to all of these questions.