In North East Scotland, an industrial carbon capture and storage, or CCS project has been awarded a significant amount of funding in order to carry out feasibility studies over the course of the next 18 months.
The project will be carried out by Acorn and will involve capturing the emissions from the St Fergus gas terminal that is situated near Peterhead and then transport and store them beneath the North Sea within the redundant oil and gas infrastructure that is there. The CCS process works by capturing waste carbon dioxide from areas that it is released in high quantities and taking it to a storage site where it is unable to enter the atmosphere, for example underground in a geological formation. This process will stop large quantities of carbon dioxide getting in to the atmosphere from sites like fossil fuels power plants.
The amount of the grant that has been awarded as part of the Advancing CCS Technologies round of the EU’s ERA-NET programme has not been confirmed yet, but it is thought that the funding amounts to millions of pounds. The studies for this project will be carried out by a consortium which has been formed by the project developer CO2DeepStore; the consultancy firm Pale Blue Dot Energy; Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage, the research group; Bellona the Norwegian climate change foundation; Liverpool University and Radboud University which is located in the Netherlands. The lead partners for this research is Pale Blue Dot Energy. This consultancy company is an established affiliate of the project developers CO2DeepStore.
The funding announcement is thought to allow the consortium to progress with their Acorn project for the next 18 months and will hopefully also create a more widespread awareness of the different benefits gained from CCS.
The project will make sure that CO2 that is captures and stored in the North Sea will be kept separate from the gas that is feeding in to the St Fergus terminal. The project, Acorn, has been in development for a while however their progress has been hindered due to the UK’s concentration on other clean power schemes.
