Britain's Conservatives reaffirm support for oil and gas industries, placing significant faith in Carbon Capture Storage technology.

The UK government has announced a new strategy, 'powering up Britain', which places carbon capture and storage (CCS) at the heart of its revised energy transition strategy. As part of this strategy, the government aims to deploy two CCUS clusters by 2025, and additional two by 2030.

In a move to expand domestic oil and gas production, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government issued a flurry of new North Sea oil and gas production licences in September, including the green light for the development of the Rosebank oil field, which potentially contains 500 million barrels of oil and gas. Oil production in the Rosebank field is expected to commence in 2027 and continue for around twenty years.

The development of Rosebank will be led by the Norwegian state-controlled energy giant Equinor. The government has also awarded 21 offshore carbon storage licenses to 14 companies for the storage of CO in depleted oil and gas reservoirs and saline aquifers under the North Sea. The government's goal is to scale offshore CO storage capacity towards 30 million metric tons per year by 2030, or approximately 10% of UK annual emissions.

The Acorn CCS project, led by UK supermajor Shell, has received additional funding and is progressing into the front-end engineering and design phase. The development of CCS is directly related to using CO for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), a process that can help squeeze between two to four barrels of oil out of already developed fields. Previous studies by oil producers involved in Acorn and other new CCS schemes suggest that using captured CO for EOR along the UK's continental shelf could yield approximately 6 billion barrels of additional crude oil.

However, not everyone is in favour of this approach. Professor Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage at the Edinburgh University, stated that it's essential for Acorn and other CCS projects to provide a genuine decrease of emissions and not become a policy excuse for increased oil and gas extraction. More than 700 scientists wrote to the Prime Minister asking him to halt the licensing of new fossil fuel developments and criticizing the use of CCS as a 'get-out-of-jail card' for continued oil and gas extraction.

Grant Shapps, the UK's energy and net zero secretary, boasted that the UK has a geological advantage in storing carbon for the next 250 years under the North Sea. The government has allocated a £20 billion subsidy for the UK's new CCUS Cluster Sequencing Process.

As the UK continues to navigate its energy transition, the balance between fossil fuel production and renewable energy development remains a contentious issue. The shift towards renewable energy has been slowed down by the UK government, with Prime Minister Sunak continuing to reverse his nation's climate progress by slowing new wind energy development and re-embracing fossil fuels.

Britain's Conservatives reaffirm support for oil and gas industries, placing significant faith in Carbon Capture Storage technology.