Energy Views

Carbon Capture is a term that's been around for quite a while. It's the umbrella category for Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) and its cousin Carbon Capture and Utilisation (CCU). Carbon Capture projects were once all the talk in UK policy circles, before major public funding was axed and industry players withdrew. But now it's back up the agenda. The British Government has recently  introduced legislation to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 , and its independent advisers - the Committee on Climate Change - said in its May 2019 report  (p182) that CCS "was on the critical path" for achieving this. It suggested that a whopping 75-175 million tonnes (megatonnes, Mt) per annum of CO₂ storage would be needed by that time. But let's go back a little and briefly define some terms. Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) means capturing carbon dioxide (CO 2  herein) from an industrial process - like making energy or a tangible substance - and burying it permanently in...

Hydrogen is bandied about by many authors as the solution to all our energy challenges. Consuming it in a fuel cell vehicle or turbine, the proponents frequently remind us, produces just water, rather than the dreaded CO2 produced by fossil fuels. Gaseous hydrogen plasma (purple) in a discharge tube The hydrogen that we increasingly read about is gaseous hydrogen, a component of the air that we breathe. As opposed to cryogenically-cooled liquid hydrogen, which is combusted in space rockets. Gases, as our teachers taught us at school, have the advantage of being compressible, unlike liquids, and whilst in vehicles this requires expensive carbon-fibre tanks, this helps to overcome the lower energy density of hydrogen relative to petroleum-based fuels like diesel. But pure hydrogen in gaseous form can unleash terrifying results: the airship Hindenburg's explosion resulted from the ignition of its hydrogen envelope, and the viral video showing an explosion at Fukushima Daiichi...