Drax Carbon Capture Could Cost Bill Payers £40 Billion
By Paul Homewood
More from the Guardian on Drax Carbon Capture:
Drax has received permission from the government to fit carbon capture technology to its wood-burning power plant, in a project that could cost bill-payers more than £40bn.
The energy secretary, Claire Coutinho, on Tuesday approved the project to convert two of its biomass units to use the technology.
Analysts have predicted that the revamp of the North Yorkshire site could be one of the most expensive energy projects in the world.
The project could add about £1.7bn to energy bills every year if the company acts on plans to fit all four of its biomass units with carbon capture technology, or a total of more than £43bn, according to Ember, a climate thinktank.
In addition, the government is expected within days to extend a lucrative bill-payer-backed subsidy scheme that last year paid Drax more than £600m to burn trees for electricity until the end of the decade.
The decision is likely to anger environmentalists, who have campaigned against burning imported wood pellets and have opposed the multi-billion-pound subsidies paid to Drax over the past 12 years.
A report commissioned by Drax has claimed that adding carbon capture to its biomass power units could save the UK economy up to £15bn between 2030 and 2050 when compared to other, more complex carbon reduction measures using biomass.
Phil MacDonald, the chief operating officer at Ember, said the report ignored the “immediate real costs” of building the plant, which are likely to fall to taxpayers or energy users.
“Over 20 years, this could make Drax’s BECCS plans one of the most expensive energy projects in the world, funded from bill-payers’ pockets,” MacDonald said.
Just because Drax BECCS might be cheaper than other BECCS schemes is hardly a recommendation!
Ember’s costings are here. They include current subsidies and look reasonable.
Not only would Drax need to recoup the capital cost, which they have said will be billions. There will also be increased operating costs, not least because carbon capture itself is an energy intensive process. In other words, some of Drax’s generation will have to be used to power the Carbon Capture plant, instead of being sold.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Nucleaar is the only answer, but the politicians are all too weak to do anything about it, other than to kick the can down the road.
Phillip, not rushing into things is the answer
They create false urgency, and then make a load of costly mistakes (Pioneer Fallacy)
When looked at the PR tweet of the execs in suits
I thought that’s the same type of people that pushed through the Post Office Horizon system
.. World leaders in screwing up sub-postmasters lives.
Interesting comment in the DT today, Stew: Crown Post Offices, which also suffered shortfalls in their accounts had the shortfalls cancelled out so the CPO postmaster didn’t suffer. If true, I wonder at the legality of it.
That will, sadly, be the next costly mistake. Another knee jerk rush – building nuclear when everything else falls apart.
It was described in financial terms as ‘Boom and Bust’ notably by Gordon Broon, something he put and end to, according to him.
Otherwise known as ‘Panic Button Syndrome’.
The single most used political policy, common to all British governments.
So what becomes of all the “carbon” they “capture”? Does it stay sequestered forever or what?
They pump it into the same caves that are going to be used to store hydrogen. Or something.
Can I buy a cave?
A good property investment anyway. There’ll be a big demand for decent places to live once Net Zero is up and running
No.
According to Henry’s law every molecule will be replaced by one from that huge CO2 sink covering nearly three quarters of the Earth’s surface to a depth of around three miles.
One can be sure the folks that think-up these things did not pass physics and chemistry classes. The same for people that buy “carbon” indulgences (aka credits); latest being Taylor Swift.
I’ve wondered about this also. I can’t see how you can ever prove that carbon dioxide that you have pumped underground actually stays there. If it slowly seeps back out there is no way of knowing this.
But for the purveyors of this scheme that is no downside – they get the subsidies, make their profits and no-one can show that what they’ve done is useless.
What’s not to like about this scam?
Local TV news had a PRasNews item for this last night .. expires at 6pm
Minute 16 to 17 Jonathan Brearley – Chief Executive Officer – Ofgem visiting CATCH Training Institute in Stallingborough
All the usual PRtrickery like getting kids to say “UK can be world leader” etc
https://www.itv.com/watch/news/catch-up-on-itv-calendar-south-from-tuesday-16th-january/7zhzhwc
PR folk have put out 4 tweets about it
Just 8 Likes in total
Instead of E Cluster, shouldn’t that be Cluster F…?
Brearley is just plain incompetent, OFGEM screw everything up, We would have a more competitive gas and electricity market if they never existed!
So as well as the carbon capture gubbins, there has to be a pipeline into the north sea to pump the CO2 into a depleted oil/gas field. Is the CO2 going to stay there?
Hope not. i want all that CO2 back in the atmosphere to feed my vegetables!
Whether Brearley is incompetent or not depends upon what his intentions are. Given that he has been charged with – and seems to be doing with enthusiasm – driving forward the Net Zero insanity then he is doing well. But if you think that OFthingyies are there to work for the benefit of the people, then like every other one OFGEM is a massive failure as it makes things worse for gas and electricity customers.
The idea of sticking CO2 in a big cave under the sea seems impractical certainly in the long term. Firstly it is clear that the amount of accessible storage space must be finite and so when it is all filled the process stops and secondly it seems likely that CO2 will leak out anyway. Presumably the amount of CO2 that is pumped in is treated as sequestered carbon and any leakage is ignored.
Stupid waste of time and money.
Paul Ehrlich –
Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.
Gavin Strong –
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Professor Celia Deane-Drummond, from Chester University:
“The problem is a near-universal breakdown in relationships. A new category of SIN is needed – anthropogenic sin”.
Can’t say they didn’t warn us of their aims.
Maurice Strong I believe, not Gavin.
Too are right thanks.
Did they consider just burning £50 notes?
Probably cheaper and more reliable.
Dunno….as they are now plasticky is there a pollution issue with burning them?
You are right, of course. Although I remember a detailed discussion with one of the top scientists at the Alkali Inspectorate (at about the time that the Environment Agency took over the Inspectorate’s monitoring and enforcement duties).
He pointed out that a properly designed, constructed and managed incinerator burning municipal waste (including plastics), annually produced less dioxins and other nasties at ‘top of chimney’, than a November 5 bonfire and firework party in the corner of a semi-detatched’s garden. This was based on actual measurements taken at the top of the chimney of Cleveland’s then new incinerator.
None the less, he judged that, at that time it would be impossible to obtain permission for other incinerators, energy from waste plants and the like.
Because of GangGreen’s lies and their then preference for “100% Recycling”, regardless of cost & feasibility. I also remember attending a day conference on recycling problems at the Building Research Establishment in Watford (before they were “Privatised” in 1997), when two young lady Newcastle Council Officers showed up. They were undertaking a programme of council house refurbishment and were keen to learn how best to remove the melamine facing from MDF or chipboard panels in scrap kitchen units. Not sure what they intended to do next with either chipboard or melamine.
I would have needed a heart of stone not to laugh in their faces.
Can these people actually point to any CCS system that is working, anywhere?
The amount of CO2 they capture and store (two totally different technologies) will not make a blind bit of difference to the global amount of CO2 (approx 420 ppm) – it’ll just make electricity a whole lot more expensive.
And CO2 makes not a blind bit of difference to Temperature or climate.
1000yrs ago lunatic westerners went on crusades to spread misery and mayhem due to idiotic religious fantasies. Now they crusade against CO2 as the in vogue idiotic religious fantasy. Human intelligence doesnt seem to have evolved over the last 1000yrs.
I can point to a couple that sort of worked. One in the Algerian Sahara at In Salah, where they found that pumping up the reservoir with CO2 led to “microseismic” events. The Norwegians have been pumping CO2 into the reservoir at Sleipner, and there have been a couple of projects in Canada associated with enhanced oil recovery.
Dr James Verdon provided some useful commentary and observation at his Frackland blog:
https://frackland.blogspot.com/search/label/CCS
Claire Coutinho seems to have an infinite pot of money to finance all this madness. Carbon dioxide is the life blood of the planet, how did we get to demonising it? As I always point out, the climate change act 2008 has the law behind it. That is the reason that the thick government officials are throwing all this money at totally impossible schemes. Until the climate change act is repealed nothing will change.
Exactly, the point I made at a recent NZW meeting in HoL to MPs there. CCA needs to go asap.
A fraction of that cost could fund some honest science to determine what China and India and Russia and some others already know, CO2 causes known good and does not control the temperature or sea level. Water is abundant, water changes state, ON DEMAND. Water in its changing states has self correcting factors that easily overpowers any warming influence of CO2.
It would make more sense to close Drax and build a Nuclear plant with the £40 billion. Hinklypoint C is coming in under that amount. The Westinghouse AP 1000 series which South Korea andChina are constructing seems a better bet than EDF designs.
Sizewell C has just received its Development Consent Order so construction can begin. Estimated at £20-30 billion so definitely cheaper. Or you could build a good few SMR for that price.
https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-to-get-new-nuclear-built-faster
linked from Guido today
‘Unilateral recognition offers a solution. Why not automatically approve designs accepted as safe elsewhere in the world by respected regulators like the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission?’
Because the goal of the regulators is to prevent nuclear reactors.
I have written to my Conservative MP, citing this article, beginning “you have to be kidding me”.
Ilma: So have I – titled DRAX – Wishful Thinking.
If carbon (dioxide) capture really worked why not add it to coal fired stations which produce reliable energy cheaper and more energy can be stored onsite for future burning.
The biggest ‘White elephant’ in history.
The reality is DRAX is dispatchable and outside of gas there are no other dispatchable generators left after Ratcliffe goes so they’ve really no choice but to keep it going. Its utterly wrong but the climate evangelists will have a meltdown if anymore gas is built now.
As i say nothing short of rolling blackouts now is going to get anyone to wake up before its too late.
Why would carbon-capture be needed, Drax burns ‘renewable’ fuel?
If it’s needed, why not do it at source – in Canada & the USA? That saves the shipping emissions too!
OT
BBC selling off its Vinyl record collections some 50k discs, also selling the Eastenders set … Looks like the BBC are in trouble.
Not sure. Selling off the vinyl means that they can no longer really offer the recordings that older generations grew up with in classical, jazz and popular music: that seems almost an intentional slap in the face. Didn’t they build a new Eastenders set (doubtless renaming Albert Square in the process to something more contemporary approved by Sadiq Khan)? I wouldn’t know, because I never watched.
Wasn’t the new Eastenders set massively expensive? Still, other people’s money and all that….
Really bad news. The only thing in the BBC worth a fiddler’s fart is the content of their archives. They are already starting to pick out programmes / episodes that they object to as insufficiently Woke (e.g. Fawlty Towers “Don’t Mention the War”).
Who trusts the management or workforce of the BBC?
Certainly not me!
Our atmosphere is already deficient in CO2 for optimal plant & crop growth – we should be releasing far more for a greener, healthier world
Agree e.w. We have had expert botanists on this site desribing how an increased CO2 level allows plants to grow using less water. Thus helping to explain the crop yield increase we see across the world. Others talk about CO2 being released by warmer oceans, just as a refrigerated lemonade bottle behaves when it warms up. Since our oceans occupy 7/10ths of the world’s surface I predict that quantity of CO2 captured at Drax will be swamped by the CO2 released by the oceans.
Many families in the UK live at ‘just above broke’ levels, squandering precious tax-payers money at this level is hard to forgive.
Can anyone show me a calculation that shows
1) To produce 1 GW of output power
How many tonnes of coal or wood pellets are require
a) with CCS including all cavern filling compresssion and pipeline infrastructure
b) without CCS
2) CAPEX for this project including all items from CC separation equipment to compression and injection of CO2 and pipeline infrastructure
I will bet my bottom dollar that noone least of all Officew for Budget Responsibility or Climate Change Committee has done the sums
My guess for 1) is that it probably takes 50% more fuel with CCS but someone should tell us
Alastair: There is no answer to your second question because the technology hasn’t been inventetd yet. My query to my MP was how on earth could Ms Coutinho approve the expenditure of billions without demanding from Drax how they propose to spend it?
I spotted one obvious error in the EMBER report: while they bothered to look up the current Drax CFD price (it’s actually £132.47/MWh) they simply quoted the 2012 money Administrative Strike Price for AR6 for offshore wind at £73/MWh, forgetting that with indexation that is now worth £100.60/MWh, and that offshore floating wind – touted also as a future input to electrolysis is an eye-watering £176/MWh in 2012 money or £242.54/MWh.
I think they’re in the ballpark for the value of the subsidy that would be needed in £/MWh, but I suspect they have come in on the low side for the annual Drax output. The CFD financed unit has been badly hid by the perverse way the Baseload Market Reference Price is set for 6 months at a time using thinly quoted forward baseload prices that have been heavily influenced by the French nuclear outages and the extreme market volatility during the energy crisis which left baseload generators at extreme risk if they suffered a plant mishap having committed at lower prices ahead of time, which would force them to buy back their contracts at excruciating prices. Both at Drax and Lynemouth, CFD operations had virtually ceased because the CFD was only viable at prices well above the Reference Price and thus only activated when the market was in distress.
I think the economics for the ROC funded part have at times been less favourable too: they seemed to manage better utilisation in earlier years, and they would surely seek to be run preferentially as baseload if they were deemed to be carbon negative. So I think the cost in £bn would be much higher.
https://www.ref.org.uk/generators/include/graph_monthly.php?rid=C00083RAEN®oid=C00526BWEN&lecid=0
“…will be replaced by one from [the ocean.]”
In the short term (a few years) it will be replaced (so to speak) by just half a molecule. The other half will appear in a century or two, as the whole ocean comes closer to being fully mixed.
Still, I would agree that equilibrium chemistry is terra incognita to almost the whole population. I would wager money, at “favourite’s odds,” that a random civil servant, or politician, or even a businessman in the energy industry, would be astonished to be told that there are natural carbon cycles involving the sea. Of course, he would probably put his fingers in his ears as soon as he realized he was going to learn something that he was forbidden to know.
Oh yes, rocks in their head.
I wonder how many Tory MPs (and Civil Servants) will be employed by Drax next year ?
I see Sushi’s Dolly Coutinho has been spouting lies again – or is she just thick – about interconnectors. According to her tiny mind these will bring us cleaner energy, cheaper energy and energy security. Daily Sceptic has a superb take down on all three lies. Given that we need imports to prop up our grid due to government incompetence this will come from additional sources which is very likely to be coal or diesel. And we have to pay through the nose for imports in time of need as we compete with others doing the same thing but when we export excess wind energy it is at a time when demand is low and so too prices. Often we have to pay to get rid of it and no business runs on buy high and sell cheap. The final lie about security is undermined by the vulnerability of the undersea cables – note how the CIA blew up a gas pipeline in the Baltic – and that there being spare capacity anywhere else given that reliable generation is being removed and demand increased.
More under the radar changes coming to CFDs, including onshore repowering (likely controversial as new turbines will be much taller than those they replace), offshore solar and means to subsidise colocated storage.
https://www.current-news.co.uk/uk-government-outlines-key-changes-for-cfd-scheme/
Is there anything that doesn’t qualify as affordable in green energy fantasy world?
If they are burying CO2 in wells, can someone please explain to me how they can guarantee that there will never be a well blow-out?
The Lake Nyos blow-out killed 2,000 people. How many people will die in a CC blow-out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster
Ralph