Ed Miliband has finally made a firm announcement on the future role of coal in the UK’s energy mix. After a long review and consistent pressure from the likes of Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, the government has stated that no new coal-fired power stations will be built in the UK without at least a quarter of the emissions being captured by carbon capture and storage technology. The Energy and Climate Change Secretary added that power companies planning to build new coal-fired power stations will also have to scale up their plans to include full carbon emissions capture by 2025 -- provided that In the words of the government, the technology is “technically and economically proven.”

This is a real victory for the environmental NGOs who have been campaigning hard on the issue of new coal, as it marks a dramatic U-turn from the government. They have praised Ed Miliband for acknowledging that we cannot go on building more coal plants, which are the largest emitters of CO2 in the UK. Energy company E-ON are now looking at their plans at Kingsnorth, where they intended to build a new coal power station with no plans for carbon capture, and are now proposing a cluster of “demonstration” stations pumping carbon into a pipeline under the Thames estuary taking the carbon to be buried under the North Sea. 

There are still some looming questions over the policy however. Firstly, Carbon Capture Storage (CCS) technology is a highly controversial proposal. The arguments against it range from “It can never work”, to “It could work in theory, but it would be so ridiculously expensive that it would impossible to finance.” Whilst there are several theories on the best way to isolate carbon emissions from power stations and store them somewhere, there is not one working example of this in the world. 

So what would happen if the technology cannot be built? Or if the companies build coal plants the Coal plants and discover CCS doesn’t work? Will they be shut down and cause havoc with the energy supply?

More fervent critics also point out that the recommendations to government by the likes of Lord Turner’s Climate Change Committee and James Hansen, head of NASA, are that no power station should be built without complete CCS as of today – not by 2025. Even at 75%, that’s a huge volume of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by a power plant the size of Kingsnorth.

As with so many of the government’s environmental policies, this is just a step in the right direction, without making the whole leap.

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