By Paul Homewood
h/t idau
Miliband spaffs yet more taxpayer money down the drain:
From MSN:
Ed Miliband has been forced to set aside £8 billion to cover the risk of a carbon capture disaster as the costs of net zero stack up.
The Energy Secretary’s department has taken the charge to compensate companies in case the technology fails. It will in effect act as an insurance policy for risks ranging from CO2 leaks to simply not making enough money.
The £8 billion is thought to be in addition to the £22 billion of funding and subsidies already pledged by the Government to support the nascent industry.
Details were buried in Rachel Reeves’s Spring Statement, which listed the colossal sums simply as “contingent liabilities” without giving any explanation.
Contingent liabilities is the term for money set aside to cover unpredictable future events with potentially disastrous costs.
The Treasury has since confirmed that the money is specifically to support companies involved in building the carbon capture and storage industry.
Executives have told ministers that although the technology could open the way to a net zero future, it is also fraught with potentially expensive risks.
Carbon capture involves stripping CO2 from the emissions produced by industries like power stations, cement factories and refineries. The CO2 would then be compressed into a liquid and transported via a network of pipelines, eventually being buried deep in the rocks beneath the seabed.
However, the industry fears CO2 could leak from the pipelines or from underground storage sites. Such an escape on land could be not only disastrously expensive but also dangerous. Plugging a leak in a repository deep under the sea would meanwhile be both difficult and expensive.
Sarah Jones, a junior energy minister, previously announced plans to indemnify the industry in the Commons but without giving costs.
She said: “Carbon capture usage and storage is the only feasible method for decarbonising many hard-to-abate sectors such as cement production, and is currently the most cost-effective method of decarbonising others, such as dispatchable power.
“While there is growing interest worldwide, a programme of this nature is first of a kind and consequently there are multiple market barriers which inhibit the development of a carbon capture usage and storage market in the UK.
“Government support is necessary to address these challenges and enable carbon capture usage and storage deployment at scale.
“The Government is reducing investor risk in these technologies by bearing some of the initial risk inherent in developing a carbon capture usage and storage market, as well as the cross-chain risk existing across the participants in the network.”
Mr Miliband launched the UK’s first so-called carbon capture clusters last autumn with funding for two initial sites in Teesside and Merseyside and more to follow. The Energy Secretary predicted then that the industry would eventually generate 50,000 jobs by the 2030s.
In simple terms, DESNZ is not only paying subsidies to cover the cost of carbon capture to companies like BP, they are also providing insurance to pick up the bill if things go wrong.
For BP, it is a win-win. For taxpayers, it is a lose-lose.
Am I the only one to think that Ed Miliband believes he has a God given right to spend our money however he sees fit?
FOOTNOTE
I don’t know whether DESNZ are naive or utterly mendacious:
“A spokesperson for the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero said it was “misleading” to argue that household bills would increase by £255 a year because the costs were also borne by businesses.”
What do they think businesses will do when hit with these extra costs? They will either put up prices, cut wages or slash jobs. Whichever, it is the public who will end up paying one way or another, just as we will be with Rachel from Accounts’ jobs tax.