Capturing Carbon Dioxide at Longannet

Scottish Power, National grid and Shell are proposing to capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise be pumped into the air from a power station in Longannet, Fife, in Scotland along a natural gas pipe line that runs through Fife, Falkirk, Stirling, Perth, Angus and Aberdeenshire and thence into the old depleted gas wells under the North sea from which natural gas has been extracted.

Longannet is Scotland’s largest polluter and is owned by Scottish power. Longannet burns coal, (consuming 4.5 thousand tonnes every year) but can also burn gas biomass and sludge, and is the largest power station in Scotland and the third largest in the United Kingdom. Reactive to the electricity it produces it is the most polluting power station in the United Kingdom.

The plan to store carbon dioxide under the North Sea is probably a sound one. Methane gas had been stored there of millions of years before we drilled for it, so the store should be as safe as is possible, and even if some gas leaches into the sea through surrounding rocks, the environmental impact will be significantly less than doing what Longannet does at present and sending the carbon dioxide into the air to create pollution and hasten climate change.

The initiative is to be warmly applauded, but from what I have seen so far the plan is good in relation to what happens to the carbon dioxide. The Health and Safety Executive is looking at the implications of pumping carbon dioxide along the pipeline as far as the residents along the route are concerned, but carbon dioxide is less dangerous than methane, so common sense indicates that there should be no safety concerns.

The part of the plan that I am unsure about is how the power station will capture the carbon dioxide from the emissions (which include air) that the power station creates when coal is burnt. Those details will not be ready for some time, but if they can solve that problem and capture a significant amount of emissions burning coal at Longannet may be no more polluting than burning natural gas there.