The UK can’t see that Acorn is key to a just transition

To much fanfare, Sir Keir Starmer announced that his government was to instead invest £22 billion in “carbon capture clusters” in Merseyside and Teesside over the next quarter century. Yet another example of “no change” between Labour and the Conservatives, with a UK Government giving a thumbs up to investment in the North of England while sticking two fingers up to the North East of Scotland.

We’ve been here before. And the betrayal has come from all three main Westminster parties.

In 2014, just ahead of the indyref, the then energy secretary – LibDem Ed Davey – confirmed Peterhead as the location for the world’s first gas-fired CCUS facility, to be backed up with a planned £100 million UK Government investment.

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Only a few months after the No win, the UK Government decided to cancel the project. Next came the May 2015 Tory manifesto boasting of an ambition to become “the greenest government ever” by “committing £1 billion for carbon capture and storage.”

Just a matter of months later, the UK Tory government had cancelled those plans too, leaving Peterhead high and dry once more.

Fast forward to October 2021. This time, we had Boris Johnson telling radio listeners in Scotland that his Government was about to invest in CCUS.

Yet what was announced wasn’t a go-ahead for Peterhead’s Acorn project – then the most advanced CCUS project in the UK. Instead, it was announced that while CCUS schemes in the north of England would be green lighted with a priority “Track One” status, the Acorn project was not to be among them.

To save face, a completely new “Track One Reserve” status was dreamt up by the UK Government for Acorn, presumably to imply that while it wasn’t in the first round, it was still positioned ahead of projects on Track Two.

(Image: Press Association Images/Press Association Images) Despite this quite obvious setback, our North East Tory politicians still clapped like demented seals, desperate to show how Westminster was “delivering” for the region, even in the face of clear evidence to the contrary.

They continued to do so even after Professor Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh, informed a Holyrood committee in December 2021 that all this reserve status meant in practice was “a lot of meetings”, requiring companies to “run on the spot with very little or no funding”.

So why does this matter? News of the duplicity of the Tories and their willingness to embrace any humiliation from their London colleagues so long as it comes wrapped in a Union Jack will be of no surprise to National readers. What should concern us is how Labour’s glib claim that “decarbonisation shouldn’t mean deindustrialisation” appears once again to exclude viewers in Scotland.

There’s a fair bit of opposition to CCUS from those who see it as a way of “greenwashing” the oil and gas industry. And yes, there’s no doubt it can help to reduce total emissions from oil and gas extraction. But that’s rather an important thing to be able to do when 75% of our total energy is from fossil fuels.

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Everyone recognises – even in the fossil fuel industry itself – that a day will come when no more oil and gas extraction is happening at scale in Scottish waters. However, saying “no further new developments, ever” as Labour have, is just a piece of pointless halo-polishing if it means meeting our demand for fossil fuels with importing carbon-intensive oil and gas from elsewhere.

TO be clear, any new extraction must be compatible with meeting energy needs and supporting jobs on our pathway to net-zero. That is why the SNP have called for a clear and transparent climate compatibility checkpoint in place. We all want to see the energy transition happen much more quickly.

However, by scaling back their commitment to investing in renewables from £28bn to £8bn and seeking to capitalise GB Energy with further windfall taxes on the North Sea, Labour risk prematurely choking off North Sea oil and gas; and at the same time slowing the development of renewables and the jobs and economic opportunities which can come with that.

The route to achieving net-zero runs largely through decarbonising industrial processes which rely on heat generation; by decarbonising transport and decarbonising domestic heating. But that’s not going to happen overnight no matter how much money governments and industry are prepared to direct towards doing so. And nor is it going to get rid of the emissions from other carbon intensive industries such as the manufacture of chemicals, concrete and cement.

That’s why Acorn is so strategically important when it comes to reducing Scotland’s overall climate impact in the short to medium term, and through its ability to accept carbon from elsewhere, to helping meet European net-zero goals as well. And that is why it is almost inexplicable that it has yet to find its way to the front of the queue for support from those famously broad shoulders of the UK Treasury.

Back in those heady pre-referendum days when Scots were being urged to lead and not leave, Ed Davey claimed that an independent Scotland would find it “more difficult to proceed” with CCUS. Ten years on, it should be clear for all to see that if Scots want something done properly, we need to have the powers to be able to do it for ourselves.