Cancellation of the carbon capture and storage (CCS) commercialisation programme by the government will make it more costly for the UK to meet its carbon targets, according to the Energy Technologies Institute.
It estimates that if scrapping the programme delays CCS deployment in the UK by 10 years, to 2030, it will add £1–2bn a year throughout the 2020s to the otherwise best achievable cost for reducing emissions.
Even if CCS is deployed in 2030, the delay caused by abandoning the £1bn programme, which was announced in November, is also likely to increase longer term costs, adding an estimated £4–5bn a year to the cost of reducing emissions in 2040, says the institute.