If the government gives the green light to big new coal-fired power stations like Kingsnorth in Kent or Tilbury in Essex – even if it’s in order to test small-scale Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) projects – it would increase the country’s overall carbon emissions, rather than reducing them.

The power sector is currently responsible for more than 30% of the UK’s CO₂ emissions, and around 70% of this comes from burning coal.

WWF’s Head of Climate Change, Keith Allott, says: “Building a new power station on the scale of Kingsnorth, with CCS technology covering only a small portion of its output, will raise the country’s carbon emissions by millions of tonnes.

“A much smarter way of demonstrating and testing the technology is to use an existing power station – this would actually reduce our emissions, and also avoid locking us in to a new generation of polluting coal stations.”

Carbon capture comparisons
The idea of CCS is to reduce emissions from burning coal and gas by capturing CO₂ and then transporting it to underground storage sites.

So far the process hasn’t been proven on a commercial scale, but in April the government announced it will fund up to four demonstration schemes to test different carbon capture technologies.

To help the government make the right decisions, WWF commissioned IPA Energy + Water Economics to compare the potential impacts of testing the CCS process on an existing or a new coal-fired power station.

The new report shows that if the technology is tested at the 300MW scale proposed by the government, on a brand new 1,600MW coal power station, overall emissions from the power sector could increase by 32 million tonnes of CO₂ between 2014 and 2025.

By comparison, fitting carbon capture to an existing power station, such as Scottish Power’s plant at Longannet, would reduce overall emissions by 14.5 million tonnes of CO₂ over the same period.

Emissions performance standard
As Keith Allott adds: “Technical problems with CCS, or claims of excessive cost, mean there’s a real possibility that retrofitting an entire power station would prove unfeasible and unattractive to power companies further down the line.

“That’s why a safety net, such as an Emissions Performance Standard (EPS), must also be in place from the outset.”

An EPS would set a legally enforceable limit on emissions, which could be tightened further in future. This would ensure any demonstration project must ultimately lead to full-scale CCS, and that eventually all existing coal stations will face full CCS costs.

“The Committee on Climate Change has advised the government that the power sector should be almost completely carbon-free by 2030. But if current proposals for a new generation of largely unabated coal-fired power stations are approved, it would present a huge challenge to the UK’s prospects of meeting emission reduction targets, and to any aspirations of continuing to show leadership in tackling climate change.”

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