Luke Warren chief executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association: CCUS is a necessity not an option if we’re to have any hope of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. I was interested to read your recent article “CCUS is a stopgap to a big hydrogen world” which called CCUS a “blunt, end of pipe, short term solution” to tackling climate change. Instead, Tom Baxter argues, we should bypass CCUS and focus our ambition and investment on delivering green hydrogen. We certainly agree that hydrogen is becoming an extremely attractive solution for decarbonising heat and transport, sectors that have proved to be incredibly hard to decarbonise to date. But Tom misses the essential point about the very nature of CCUS technology when he says we should ‘bypass CCUS” in order to decarbonise our economy and stimulate investment in hydrogen. Firstly, evidence suggests that reforming natural gas with CCUS is currently the best solution for producing large-scale, low-cost clean hydrogen. This can then be used to decarbonise both industrial and domestic heating, as well as transport. Using CCUS with hydrogen production can therefore help stimulate the hydrogen economy and enable, rather than delay, the development of other methods of clean hydrogen production. Secondly, the article paints CCUS as a technology fix for the fossil fuel industry. This is extremely misleading, as it fails to consider the economy wide benefits of CCUS.
Energy Voice 20th May 2019 read more »