Big Oil and Clean Coal: Shell Joins CCS Group in U.K.

There’s been plenty of hand-wringing in Britain over the lack of progress on clean coal (well, over the lack of progress on anything energy-related, come to think of it). Could Big Oil bring the coal back to Newcastle, as it were?

Royal Dutch Shell said today that it was joining a consortium to compete for government money to build the country’s first commercial-scale clean-coal plant. The consortium includes Scottish Power (owned by Iberdrola) and National Grid. Germany’s RWE and EON are also in the running with their own projects, but Shell is the only oil company involved.
What difference does Shell make? It’s got decades of experience getting liquids out of the ground—and more recently, injecting stuff into the ground to get more oil out.

That is precisely the “storage” part of “carbon capture and storage” that hasn’t gotten so much attention lately, but which will be the ultimate test of the feasibility or not of so-called clean coal.

There are loads of pilot projects around the world, especially in the U.S., tinkering with ways to capture the carbon emissions from coal plants. Most, for now, just vent the emissions back into the air when they’re done with their tests—there have been no large-scale demonstrations of long-term carbon storage from coal plants.

That’s what makes Scottish Power’s project, at Longannet in Scotland, interesting. It also includes National Grid—the biggest pipeline operator in the country.

Wall Street Journal