Examination of Witnesses (Questions 68-99)
DR JEFF
CHAPMAN, MR
SARWJIT SAMBHI
AND MR
RUPERT STEELE
OBE
11 DECEMBER 2007
Q68 Chairman:.Good morning gentlemen,
welcome. Do you just want to introduce yourselves so that my colleagues
know exactly whom you represent?
Dr Chapman: I am Jeff Chapman.
I am Chief Executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association.
This is an industry association. We have 53 member organisations,
all of whom are interested in the business of carbon capture and
storage. They cover the oil and gas sector, the power sector,
suppliers, contractors, consultants, law firms, academic institutions
and anyone with a business interest in carbon capture and storage.
Mr Sambhi: Sarwjit Sambhi from
Centrica. I head up the power business for Centrica, that is conventional
power generation and renewables, mainly offshore wind.
Mr Steele: Rupert Steele, Director
of Regulation at ScottishPower. We are one of the UK's big six
integrated energy suppliers. Obviously we have significant interest
in Scotland, but England as well.
Q69 Chairman: Thank you very much.
How important is CCS to achieving the global emission stabilisation
targets?
Dr Chapman: The first thing is
that CCS can make a massive contribution to achieving global targets.
The world is expected to increase its dependency on fossil fuels
over the coming years. When you have places like China which is
building at least, the UK's total capacity in coal-fired power
plants every year, this is a major problem. Normally everyone
thinks of coal as being the big issue. Well it is, but I would
just like to draw attention also to non-conventional fossil fuels.
For example, the tar sands in Athabasca, Canada and developments
of natural gas that contains CO2. Athabasca tar sand
costs about 30% more energy just to produce synthetic crude oil
and as a result of that Canada are 300 million tonnes a year above
their Kyoto commitment and that is the equivalent of, let us say,
15 Drax power stations; it is very big. So these countries have
to consider carbon capture and storage. The IEA world energy outlook
is suggesting that global emissions look set to rise by at least
30% by 2030 and the world simply cannot meet its climate objectives
without a very large proportion of carbon capture and storage.
Q70 Chairman: How quickly do we have
to get it out there, if we are actually going to make a proper
impact?
Dr Chapman: We have to get on
track now. These projects are very long timescale in development
and, if you do a bar chart from the time you want it to now, you
should have started a long time ago.
Q71 Chairman: Are we remotely near
having a chance of actually getting on track?
Dr Chapman: We could be because,
certainly in the UK and in certain other places, there are projects
that are under development that look to begin to start delivering
or could be beginning to start delivering at about 2012. If we
can accelerate that programme in a similar manner to the "dash
for gas" that took place in the 1990s, we could make a very
big impact in the second half of the next decade, towards 2020.
We could have a lot of capacity on the ground by 2020 and certainly
an awful lot of capacity in the 2020-2030 decade. It all depends
on policy.
Q72 Mr Chaytor: May I just pin you
down on the figures? There seems to be a contradiction between
what the Government said in the pre-budget report, which suggested
the demonstration project could deliver savings of 0.7 million
tonnes by 2020, and what was said in the White Paper, which was
a figure of between 1.1 and 3.7 million tonnes. From our point
of view this is hugely confusing. What do you expect the demonstration
project to be able to deliver by 2020?
Dr Chapman: The demonstration
project itself, if you assume that it is 300 megawatts, then that
300 to 400 megawatts is going to deliver about two million tonnes.
Whether or not you say that is CO2 abated, it is certainly
the CO2 emissions that will be collected and stored,
but that does not necessarily relate to what is abated because
it depends what is substituted on the generation system. If that
were nuclear, that would be nothing. If that were gas, that would
be half of that.
Q73 Mr Chaytor: Within your capacity,
within the demonstration project, your figure is about two million
tonnes.
Dr Chapman: Yes.
Q74 Mr Chaytor: In the longer term,
the Stern Review talked about the capacity to reduce total emissions
by 90% in fossil fuel power station through carbon capture and
storage. There is a figure here from the Government when the demonstration
project was launched last week suggesting that about a third of
total UK electricity could be generated with the use of carbon
capture by 2020. Do those figures sound right?
Dr Chapman: They could easily
be. At the present time there is under-development and I have
to say that because of the announcement some of these projects
are rather on the shelf, but at the present time there are at
least 10 projects under development in the UK that could have
carbon capture and storage and those projects are all coal; they
could save well over 50 million tonnes of CO2 between
them. When I say "save", I am being very advised about
that because of an argument I just made about what it displaces.
Q75 Mr Chaytor: How can you be so
sure of these 10 projects that could benefit from carbon capture
and storage when the demonstration project is not off the ground
yet? Surely you have to get the demonstration project going before
you can be sure as to how widely it could be disseminated?
Dr Chapman: That is right. Four
of those projects would be pre-combustion capture and six of those
projects are post-combustion capture. The demonstration project,
as we know, is post-combustion capture. There are things that
need to be proven in post-combustion capture and, in the end,
it is a commercial decision on behalf of suppliers as to whether
they will supply and guarantee projects of the size of 300 megawatts
or 1,000 megawatts even. What I will say is that on the pre-combustion
capture the developers of the projects have been going into this
with their eyes open, they have been spending tens of millions
of pounds on feasibility for these projects and we are talking
about large companies; companies like ConocoPhilips, companies
like BP, Shell of course. If they were not confident in their
technology, they would not have been spending that amount of money.
If you look at BP, for example, they have specifically created
a company in association with Rio Tinto called Hydrogen Energy
whose sole purpose is to produce hydrogen from coal from which
to generate power and into the future to become part of the hydrogen
economy. Those companies do not go into that if they are not confident
of the technology that goes along with it.
Q76 Joan Walley: I am just looking
at the UK really and the 2050 carbon budget. Can you just give
us a bit more information about how important CCS is in respect
of meeting those aspirations in respect of the carbon budget for
2050 and the timescale between now and then and what needs to
be put in place?
Dr Chapman: Of course I do not
have access to the kind of modelling that the Government do, but
it is quite clear that we need everything that we can do, "every
tool in the box" as Sir David King would say, to deliver
these commitments.
Q77 Joan Walley: You say you do not
have access to the modelling that has been done by Government.
One of the things that we wanted to ask you to share with us was
what modelling you were doing. How can you be doing the modelling,
if you do not have access?
Dr Chapman: As an association
we are not doing any modelling.
Q78 Joan Walley: So who is doing
the modelling?
Dr Chapman: As far as I know,
just the Government and possibly some other commercial organisation
for the benefit of their, perhaps, consultancy.
Mr Sambhi: May I offer a perspective
on that? In terms of the UK, there are two time dimensions to
the role of CCS. One is against the longer-term aspirations, whether
it is the specific emissions reduction target that the Government
have set or the Stern Review requirement or the view that you
have to get below say 550 parts per million of CO2
by 2050. Our analysis, and this is an analysis that other consultancies
have done as well, suggests that if you are to reach that, after
you have exhausted the initiatives that are low cost such as demand-side
energy efficiency initiatives, after you have exhausted the resources
in offshore wind, you get pretty close to needing to invest in
clean coal. Specifically, to meet the government aspirations clean
coal has to be in the mix. The second dimension is perhaps more
medium term. When we look at the need for new power generation
in the UK, one can model a number of scenarios but there is a
scenario which suggests that by the middle of the next decade,
there is a need for more capacity beyond those projects that have
already been committed such as Lanage and Marchwood which are
gas projects. In terms of what can fill that gap, when you look
down the list of options, nuclear new build does not really fit
in that time horizon because the earliest you could get a nuclear
project off the ground, even if you started now, would be 2018-2020,
then you look at the other options, more gas-fired power generation
or unabated coal or coal that requires carbon capture. Again,
unabated coal does not sit well alongside the emissions reduction
targets that have been set.
Dr Chapman: To put the challenge
in perspective, if you draw a straight line trajectory from now
to 2050 and you take 60% and not the 80% target that is being
mooted, then basically you have to reduce emissions by eight million
tonnes every year, year on year on year on year; from now to 2050
you have to reduce eight million tonnes of emissions. To put that
in perspective, the entire UK wind industry at the moment is only
abating just over five million tonnes a year. It is a huge programme
and of course one CCS project could achieve five million tonnes
anyway.
Q79 Joan Walley: Just to pursue that
a little bit more. With what you were saying about the Government
doing the modelling, they do not seem to be doing it in conjunction
with your business projections and so on. Given what you just
said about having to reach where we need to be for the carbon
budget by 2050, what I need to have some idea of is what lobbying
you are doing with Government to get them to take account of what
your projections are, otherwise you are all going to be on separate
tracks, are you not? It is not really going to come together in
terms of how we go about achieving where we need to be.
Mr Steele: We are broadly content
with the kind of projections that the Government have come out
with, that look to us about right, that coal will be a significant
part of the mix going forward, not least because it is so widely
dispersed and in politically more stable areas of the world. So
we are comfortable with the kinds of use that the Government have
come out with and the thought that CCS could produce about a third
of the emissions reduction stretch that we will need to achieve.
We are clear that a good amount of work needs to be done to actually
make this happen and so we are very supportive that the Government
have now bitten the bullet and got the process going with this
competition. We need to do a lot of work to get ourselves actually
operational as a country with carbon capture and storage, but
there is huge potential to make a real difference.
Q80 Joan Walley: If CCS is not developed
in the way that you would like it to be, then how long do you
think the UK will be able to maintain the existing fossil fuel
generation?
Mr Steele: Obviously the way we
work with carbon in the major sectors is through trading. The
issue will then arise as to whether the best economic decision
is to generate the electricity from coal in the UK and abate somewhere
else or generate from something else in the UK and take the abatement
in the UK. If the price of carbon is high and we do not have carbon
capture and storage working, then it is going to be increasingly
difficult for coal-fired power stations to generate cost effectively
and that will squeeze down the amount that they generate. It is
obviously very difficult to project how that will work.
Dr Chapman: If I can go back,
you asked what lobbying we were doing with Government and certainly
a couple of weeks ago I had a meeting with both Malcolm Wicks,
the Energy Minister and Phil Woolas, the Environment Minister,
at the same time and this is really what I said to them. The UK
Government have taken a tremendous initiative to sort out the
regulatory side of CCS. The only thing which stops business investing
in carbon capture and storage is policy and the policy breaks
down into two areas: one is the regulatory side of policy and
the other one is more the financial side of policy, the incentive
to go ahead with it. The Government have made tremendous efforts
and are leading the world in the development of policy, so all
compliments to the Government for doing that. The demonstrator
project is really a tremendous initiative and does show leadership
in the world because it is at least a measure comparable with
what the best of other governments are doing elsewhere. Yet, if
we are going to meet our climate objectives, we need to do a lot
more than that. There is an accelerating pace of development elsewhere
in the world and we will inevitably be upping our game in this
area even just to keep pace with the rest of the world, as well
as to save our own emissions.
Q81 Joan Walley: The point you are
saying needs more work on it, is the regulatory aspect of it,
is it? The area that you say more work is needed on is the regulatory
aspect.
Dr Chapman: No, more is needed
on the financial side, on the incentive side. The regulatory aspect
will be sorted out very soon. The UK is leading the way. In European
policy there will be a directive on CCS that will come into operation
very soon which owes an awful lot to the groundbreaking thinking
that has been done in the UK.
Q82 Martin Horwood: I share Joan
Walley's surprise that you have not been doing very much modelling.
If you are going to try to justify, certainly if you are going
to ask for more investment in this from Government, you need to
present a very strong business case and surely the modelling has
to be crucial for that. Even the political parties are attempting
simple modelling.
Dr Chapman: I have to say that
our member companies do a lot of modelling. You have to bear in
mind that we, as an association, are very young. We have only
been in existence a year and a half and we have very limited resources
so far.
Q83 Martin Horwood: But you have
the resources of your member companies in a sense.
Dr Chapman: Yes, we have.
Q84 Martin Horwood: May I pick up
something Mr Sambhi said as well? I share your analysis that this
is a crucial part of the overall carbon budget and we really do
not have a chance of meeting it without that, but you suggested
that, as a transition technology, while we are waiting for renewables
to come up to speed, it was actually a better option than nuclear
in terms of timing and potential. Did I hear you right?
Mr Sambhi: I will answer that,
but may I just pick up on the modelling. We should not get too
hung up on the question as to whether enough modelling is being
done. There is and I will explain what some of the uncertainties
are in a moment. To answer your question, I was not saying that
clean coal is a better option than nuclear. I was referring to
the next decade when there is a need for new generation, say around
2015. New nuclear cannot be considered in the mix because, even
if we started now, we could not get a new nuclear plant up and
running until towards the back end of the next decade.
Q85 Martin Horwood: But you think
carbon capture storage could be viable well within that timescale
presumably?
Mr Sambhi: Yes. Going back to
the point that Jeff made, if we had the financial support mechanisms
in place and we were able to commit to investing in a new clean
coal project, the one that we are developing up at Teesside, Eston
Grange, could be ready by the 2013 time period.
Q86 Joan Walley: May I just ask what
you mean by the financial support mechanisms in place? What would
they consist of?
Mr Sambhi: In terms of going back
to the question of what we have modelled, when we model the economics
of a clean coal project, there are several uncertainties. One
of the two biggest ones is how much it costs to build a clean
coal project. The project we are pursuing is a pre-combustion
project. The costs vary from between £1,300 per kilowatt
to anything up to £2,000 per kilowatt. That is the range
of uncertainty that we are working within at the moment. The other
uncertainty is future carbon prices. Clearly we have clarity around
phase two of the Emissions Trading Scheme but for a carbon capture
project that is going to be ready by 2013 that is not really relevant;
it is really phase three and beyond that we need to have more
certainty on. In terms of where we are on the financials, because
of the uncertainty that is created around the carbon price and
the capital expenditure, if one looks, say, at the higher end
of the capital expenditure range, then to make a project economic,
there needs to be some longer-term support. Whether that is from
Government, whether it is from an additional piece of legislation,
we are not being definitive on. With the current Emissions Trading
Scheme and the uncertainty around the future carbon price, no
commercial entity would build a clean coal project today.
Q87 Martin Horwood: Could that long-term
support simply come from a sufficiently high price of carbon?
Do you need anything more complicated?
Mr Sambhi: If one had certainty
around what range of carbon prices one might expect in phase three.
The issue at the moment, because we do not know whether we are
going to have 100% auctioning, which is something that we as a
company lobby hard for because we do not know how tight any caps
that would be imposed might be, is that the range of carbon prices
could be anything from as low as €10 to as high as "pick
your number" but consultants quote a range of €10 to
€100 as the range of uncertainty on future carbon price.
Q88 Mark Lazarowicz: As a matter
of interest, where would you say worldwide is the best example
of carbon capture and storage actually in operation at the moment?
Dr Chapman: The fact is that there
are no examples of carbon capture and storage on power plants.
There are two examples of carbon capture and storage that are
taking the CO2 which happens to be associated with
natural gas, one is in Salah in Algeria, a BP project and Sleipner
in the North Sea, which is a Statoil project. Both of those projects
capture and store about a million tonnes a year. The fact is that
that CO2 would have to be separated from the natural
gas anyway, so the biggest cost of CCS has been undertaken by
the companies before storage They are quite cheap in a sense;
they save a million tonnes each a year of CO2 very
cheaply indeed. It is the lowest-hanging fruit of carbon capture
and storage and it is good because it demonstrates things like
security of storage and so on and allows people to develop techniques
for monitoring storage. The other one is the Weyburn project which
takes CO2 from a coal gasification plant in North Dakota
and interestingly shifts it across the Canadian border a distance
of about 300 miles to Saskatchewan where it is used for enhanced
oil recovery. I wanted to come back, if possible, on the EU Emissions
Trading Scheme because it is very important. I completely agree
about what has been said about the EU Emissions Trading Scheme,
that it does not have the robustness into the future to be bankable.
That is not the only reason why projects need support. They also
need support because of the first mover, the early mover risk;
they also need support because there is a large amount of infrastructure
costs associated with the first projects that come on stream.
I am sure we will get back to infrastructure. I would like to
point out that the Government will raise at least €2 billion
from auctioning allowances in the second phase of the EUETS, that
is in the five years from 2008 to 2012. In the third phase there
is likely to be more auctioning and, as was pointed out, we do
not know how much auctioning there will be or what the price will
be. The Government could be raising something between €2
and €20 billion euros per annum from auctioning after 2013.
By the time you get to about 2014 or 2015, when this project is
coming into play, the Government could have a war chest of money
to spend on CCS. Basically, in order to finance these projects
you need a way of collecting revenue and then a way of disbursing
revenue. The Renewable Obligation, quite neatly, collects revenue
from electricity consumers and disburses it amongst the projects
that it supports. We have a way of collecting revenue because,
let us face it, the cost of these allowances bought at auction,
will be passed through to the electricity consumer and the electricity
consumer will be assuming, if they know the difference, that this
is going to some environmental good. If it just goes into the
coffers of the Treasury, it probably is not going to any environmental
good. If it is recycled to support projects of this kind, then
it will certainly be doing environmental good.
Chairman: That certainly is an issue
which the Committee has addressed and sympathises with your view
on very much.
Q89 Mr Stuart: Taking you back, you
said £1,300 to £2,000 per kilowatt as a cost. What price
of carbon would you require assuming the upper end of those costs?
Mr Sambhi: Again, there are other
variables around: what you assume the overall outright power price
is going to be and a number of other factors. To give you an idea
of range, we are looking at something, if it is at the higher
range—and I have put some caution around that because it
is the high end estimate—that would be north of €50
but at the lower end it could be as low as €25. The range
is still quite wide. What I am trying to impress on the Committee
is still the range of uncertainty around what it costs to build
economically a clean coal project. The dilemma that we have, whilst
we live with this cost uncertainty now, unless we commit to an
accelerated build of clean coal projects, is that we put at risk
the achievement of overall emission reduction goals. As I said,
once you have exhausted all the low-hanging fruits, you very quickly
come to invest in clean coal as an imperative to meet the emissions
reduction targets.
Q90 Mr Stuart: Just to take you back
to the question of using the money, if there were 100% auctioning,
the principle of the system is of course by 100% auctioning, depending
on the cap, that will dictate a price that would bring forward
things like CCS, if it is essential, while the Government do just
bank the cash. Is that not true? Is it not perfectly possible
for the Government to spend none of that money on environmental
good but still lead to investment in CCS because of the cap it
has imposed and the need to deliver within the allowances allowed?
Dr Chapman: We all believe that
in the long run the EU Emissions Trading Scheme and trading schemes
in general will be the mechanism that will stimulate investment
in low-carbon technologies, whether it is CCS or anything else.
In the meantime we have to put something in place such as the
Renewable Obligation that kick starts certain technologies. However,
we have to go quite a long way out before we can ever think that
there will be bankable certainty on the forward price of EU allowances.
Mr Steele: We estimate that you
need about €65 per tonne of carbon dioxide to make carbon
capture and storage economic with the technology as it is at the
moment. That number can come down, if we make the technology work
better. Right now we have visibility out to 2012 of a carbon price
somewhere between €20 and €30 and no idea what it will
be beyond that. You are talking about an investment which is going
to have to pay back over 20 years. That is the problem, that there
is simply not the visibility and solidity of a carbon price to
make any of these investments stand up and there will need to
be a bridge between the demonstration project that the Government
had led the world in coming forward with and a situation where
emissions trading will itself drive carbon capture and storage.
That may well be happening past 2020, but it is that bridge that
we need otherwise it is just not going to happen on the scale.
Q91 Mr Stuart: The point really is
that the Government are going to see a major return from auctioning
in the future and should invest a bit more now to help make CCS
a reality.
Dr Chapman: Yes.
Q92 Mr Stuart: May I take you to
the potential global market? What is the potential size of the
global market for CCS industries? How do you see it developing
over the next few decades?
Dr Chapman: It really is a very
big open-ended question. Whichever way you look at it, the size
of marketing CCS will be measured in trillions of pounds, dollars
or whatever currency you choose, but it is that kind of order
of magnitude. It has to be for it to have the kind of effect that
you need it to have on climate change. The IEA have estimated
that by 2030 we need 630 power plants equipped with CCS. You have
just heard that the price of those power plants could be between
£1,300 and £2,000. What are we talking about there?
That is probably £2 trillion—thinking on the hoof here—and
that is huge money. Of course if the UK gets first into this technology,
it gets itself established with a slice of the action. The UK
was very good in coming forward with policy on emissions trading
and as a result of the UK being a leader in emissions trading
policy, London has become the centre of the world's emissions
trading. We have the opportunity to do this with CCS and we should
step up to the plate.
Q93 Joan Walley: Can I ask you about
the possibility of London being the capital of CCS and what the
implications are for manufacturing?
Dr Chapman: We are not very good
at manufacturing in the UK. We have lost a lot of our metal-bashing
capability. I have to say that CCS, unlike conventional power
plants, involves a great deal more process engineering and, as
it happens, we are still good at process engineering in the UK.
Q94 Joan Walley: Where are the clusters
for that?
Dr Chapman: There are several
process engineering companies in the South East and in the North
East. You are really talking about more soft skills than before.
Typically, a quarter of the total cost of a power plant would
be in things like services, soft skills and of course the added
value in that area is very much higher. We should not worry too
much about the fact that we have lost a lot of metal-bashing capability
because the thing that makes money out of power plants is the
project management, project financing, investment, all sorts of
investment and investment matters, city services, environmental
consultancy, engineering design, in this case I mentioned process-engineering,
all of these things will be there in spadefuls in carbon capture
and storage plants and some metal bashing as well. However, we
will have to face that, for example, the likelihood that the equipment
that's supplied for the demonstrator will probably be supplied
from Japan, America or maybe Germany, but more than likely, not
supplied from the UK.
Q95 Mr Stuart: I would like to come
back to the global position. In terms of getting India and China
to retrofit all their coal-fired power stations and indeed to
fit to all new ones at some point, what is your vision for making
that happen in policy terms and technological developments? What
is it going to take, because if we do not get China and India
doing it, then we are wasting our time from an emissions point
of view, are we not?
Mr Steele: That is why it is so
important that we get to grips with the post-combustion technologies,
because China and India are installing pulverised-coal-fired plants,
which is a completely understandable decision because engineering-wise
that is the obvious way to build the power station and those can
only really be retrofitted using the post-combustion technology.
From that point of view we are very supportive of the Government's
decision to focus the demonstration project on post-combustion
because that will—
Q96 Mr Stuart: Is that true of everybody
on the panel?
Dr Chapman: I would certainly
agree with that and I would add that even more important than
demonstrating the technology is demonstrating political will.
We cannot expect China to move without first of all demonstrating
the political will.
Q97 Mr Stuart: I just meant on the
post-combustion thing particularly. Are you all happy with the
Government supporting post-combustion in the competition?
Mr Sambhi: Essentially we understand
the arguments that have been put forward as to why post-combustion
was selected as the exclusive technology. However, going back
to the comments that were made at the beginning, clean coal must
have a role to play in meeting overall emissions reduction targets.
That means pre- and post-combustion technologies have a role to
play. We see that when one compares post- and pre-combustion,
both have a range of uncertainties around capital expenditure.
Post-combustion is slightly less efficient than pre-combustion.
The thing that led us down to selecting pre-combustion as the
preferred technology was that pre-combustion has been demonstrated
to work at scale. That has not yet been done on post-combustion.
In terms of the technology for scrubbing flue gas from an existing
coal plant or conventional coal plant that has still very much
only been proven on a small scale. If it can be proven that that
can work at scale, then we can understand why you prefer post-combustion,
but where we are sitting today pre-combustion is the technology
which has been proven at scale. We do not understand why you would
exclude it.
Q98 Mr Stuart: We are going to come
to this later but I just wanted a quick nod from you two and I
apologise for interrupting you.
Mr Steele: I was basically making
the point that in order to roll out capture and storage in China
and places like that, it will be important to have post-combustion
properly tested and assessed. We are hopeful that significant
progress will be made in addressing the efficiency penalty that
Centrica have mentioned. There is a chilled ammonia process for
post-combustion capture that is making an appearance which has
less than half the efficiency penalty of the amine process that
is currently being used, so that is a very exciting development.
I will just mention that, on the pre-combustion route, our parent
company, IBERDROLA, actually is a participant in a large-scale
IGCC plant in Spain called Puertollano. It has not performed very
well and that is one of the factors that have actually driven
us towards the post-combustion angle.
Q99 Dr Turner: I understand that
a little while ago there were ten CCS projects in the wings at
various stages of development waiting to go, especially including
BP's Peterhead project which is now being pulled. Were you truly
happy that the government competition was limited to one post-combustion
plant? Do you think we would have benefited from a broader spread
of projects going ahead?
Dr Chapman: We are very happy
that the Government are doing something, but I have to say it
is not enough and it is not soon enough either because the timescale
is slipping and that is important because every year that goes
by we emit more CO2 and that stays in the atmosphere
and builds up the concentration. In short, I guess the answer
is no, we are not happy. What we would like to see is a programme
which rolls out whatever technology industry is prepared to put
its money behind and to take the risk on. There are projects that
would have delivered sooner than this demonstration project in
a competitive environment if an appropriate fiscal instrument
for initiative had been put in place; there are projects that
would deliver even sooner than this demonstration and they might
well be a pre-combustion technology, but if it were a competitive
environment, that would naturally select one or the other.
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