Energy: A technology competition that could save the planet

The Chancellor said the Government would launch a competition to build the world’s first power station to use full-scale carbon capture and storage – known as CCS – a way of minimising the emissions of carbon dioxide, from fossil fuel burning, that are helping to cause climate change.

Over the next two decades China will build 600 coal-fired power stations, and by then it will have become the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter. The Chinese are going to build these plants; only by fitting CCS technology to them could their emissions be mitigated. One senior British politician said recently: “If China does not take up CCS, we are all done for.”

independent