"Clean coal" consultation

You don't have to answer all the 24 questions. Question 3.3 invites your views on the proposed objectives of the UK CCS (carbon capture and storage) demonstration programme, including the scale of individual demonstration projects. I would suggest that such a programme is welcome, but not if it is to mask the building of much larger new unabated coal stations before even the viability of CCS at scale is known.

As the consultation paper points out, coal emits far more CO2 per unit of energy than any other fuel. Coal has also never been clean. The shifting term 'clean coal' is now attached to the attempts to limit the CO2.

No existing method extracts more than a small part of this CO2 at the scale of a typical coal power station, and carbon capture and storage is the holy grail of the energy industry. Whilst the other main fossil fuels, oil and gas, are beginning to run out, reserves of coal are relatively plentiful, particularly in China, the US, India and the UK. So industrial and developing countries are both increasingly switching to coal, either to power their energy voracious lifestyles, or to produce the industrial development to pull their people out of poverty.

The trouble is that there is overwhelming evidence that this course of action will lead to unstoppable climate change. There are 2 positive choices available: either to cut the use of coal dramatically or to find a way to retrieve the CO2 at scale and safely store it (or a mixture of both). There are tentative moves in both directions, but in each case the political declarations far outstrip the constructive efforts. For instance the consultation document says in section 1.8: "The UK is leading international efforts to develop CCS. We were, for example, one of the first countries to launch a commercial-scale CCS demonstration project in 2007..." Extraordinary! In 2007 the government announced a competition for a small pilot CCS plant. We are now in the 2nd half of 2009. Other countries are building CCS pilots. No pilot plant is being built in the UK. No winner has even been chosen yet.

The British Government has moved under pressure and argument from an intention to approve 8 new unabated coal fired power stations together with 1 small pilot CCS project to proposing 4 new unabated coal power stations alongside 4 small CCS pilot projects, with the requirement that CCS will be fitted later to the larger power stations if it can be shown to work economically.

This is the BIG IF. It is fine to build the pilots. But it is a leap of faith to press ahead, on the basis of a vague uncertain promise, with something that is so polluting that replication elsewhere will destroy human life on this planet.

What would the Martian have said about the government's proposal?

In Britain's case it is not only mad but quite unnecessary. With greater renewable energy resources than any other European country, Britain has a better road to follow. A study by the internationally respected energy consultants, Poyry, concluded that by taking energy efficiency and insulation measures as well as meeting our existing legally binding commitments on developing renewable energy, there need be no energy gap for Britain when a number of existing coal and nuclear power stations reach the end of their active lives in the period up to 2020. Yet the Government still relies heavily on the advice of the existing old polluting energy suppliers and currently in Europe is only ahead of Malta and Luxembourg in adopting renewable energy.

This doesn't need to be the case. Far from being a small insignificant player, Britain, which led the world into a coal based industrial revolution, has a unique opportunity to demonstrate to the world that there can also be a future without coal.