Is CCS a smokescreen for new coal-fired power stations?
Power companies are certainly not waiting for CCS before going ahead with plans for new coal-fired stations. There are more than six coal plants awaiting planning permission in the UK by companies including E.ON, Scottish Power, Scottish and Southern Energy and RWE npower. The applications for these either do not propose CCS, or propose to capture only a small amount of CO2 emissions. Instead, companies have offered to make the power stations CCS ready. But this is no more than a pledge to leave enough space to build a CCS plant at a later date. E.ONs planning application for its new 1,600MW coal plant at Kingsnorth in Kent is not based on it being a CCS plant. It has, however, applied separately to become one of the four bidders for the UK governments CCS demonstration project. If its Kingsnorth site wins the funding to demonstrate CCS, the technology will not be in operation until 2014. A full-scale demonstration would not get going until 2018 says an E.ON spokesperson. Even then, it
