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E.ON Scraps Plan to Compete in U.K. CO2 Project at Kingsnorth
2010-10-20 09:46:57.839 GMT
By Catherine Airlie
Oct. 20 (Bloomberg) -- E.ON AG, Germany's biggest utility,
scrapped plans to compete for U.K. funding to demonstrate the
capture and storage of carbon dioxide from a new power station
at its Kingsnorth site in Kent, southeast England.
E.ON U.K. and Iberdrola SA's Scottish Power were part of a
contest to fund Britain's first commercial-scale project to
capture carbon-dioxide emissions and store them underground.
E.ON won't take the next step in the government's competition
after it delayed construction of the plant, the company said
today in an e-mailed statement.
"We cannot proceed with the competition timescales," Paul
Golby, chief executive officer of Coventry, England-based E.ON
U.K., said in the statement. "Having postponed Kingsnorth last
year, it has become clear that the economic conditions are still
not right for us to progress the project and so, simply put, we
have no power station on which to build a CCS demonstration."
E.ON wanted to demonstrate the technology on a new 1,600-
megawatt coal-fired power station to be built next to its
existing plant at Kingsnorth. E.ON shelved the new-build plans
because they said the economic turndown had sapped demand for
power.
The Conservative-Liberal Democrat government is seeking to
cut government spending while securing energy supplies and
reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Britain could host four CCS
projects by 2020, Charles Hendry, the country's energy minister,
told lawmakers yesterday. The government adopted a plan by the
former Labour government to fund the demonstration of capturing
carbon-dioxide post combustion and then piping it underground
for storage in depleted North Sea gas fields as well as
subsidizing a further three CCS projects.
Scottish Power was not immediately available to comment on
the next stage of the CCS competition. The company plans to add
CCS technology onto its 2,300-megawatt Longannet coal plant in
Fife, Scotland.
E.ON's existing 2,000-megawatt Kingsnorth plant is due to
close by the end of 2015 under European environmental
regulations.
For Related News and Information:
Top Power Stories: PTOP <GO>
U.K. Power Prices: ELEU <GO>
--With assistance from Alex Morales in London. Editors: Rob
Verdonck, John Buckley
To contact the reporter on this story:
Catherine Airlie at +44-20-7073-3308 or
cairlie@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Stephen Voss on +44-20-7073-3520 or sev@bloomberg.net
