Following months of heated debate on the controversial new European waste laws, I am now speaking for The Greens / European Free Alliance (EFA) Group in the debate on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). In January the European Commission published what they called the “Climate Change Package” – a set of directives looking at various aspects of combatting and adapting to climate change. I will be speaking for The Green / EFA group on the CCS issue.
Of course, for someone born and brought up in the Rhondda, coal has always been close to my heart. When I was growing up we waited for the school buses alongside the miners waiting for the NCB buses. It was still the major employer and a massive part of Rhondda life.
I was active in the support groups across the coalfields in the 1984/85 miners’ strike. In fact, I believe I was the only woman ever to go underground in Maerdy pit before it was closed. I still have the lump of coal I brought home.
But things have changed. It was never a secret that coal was a massive polluter. Miners’ lungs,old coal tips, felled forests and dirty rivers bear testimony to that. But no now we also realkize there’s a climate change crisis to which coal is contributing to in a big way. In Wales, Aberthaw power station is a major polluter, despite efforts to reduce emissions. The UK government seems intent on building new coal fired power stations, despite the damage they do.
Now a new technology is being hailed as the saviour of coal – CCS. It literally means extracting the CO2 from power station emissions and storing it at high pressure deep underground. This is not reducing our pollution, it’s moving it to another place. If the storage facilities are not available near the power station, the CO2 will have to be taken by pipeline (and we all know about the ongoing controversy over the LNG pipeline) to where it can be stored. It will have to be kept there for ever.
Of course, this may be a way of reducing the CO2 we pump out into our atmosphere and that would be a good thing – if it works. At the moment we don’t know if it will work. Yes, there is a lot of research going on. We also know that it is massively expensive, which is why so many trial projects have been abandoned already.
One of my concerns is the leaking of CO2 from underground storage sites. In a meeting with the European Commission I proposed that one of the criteria for approving a storage site should be that there would be NO risk of leaking instead of the no “significant” risk of leaking they had suggested. They will look at the draft again to see if it can be changed. If we are going to pursue this new technology we have to have all the safeguards possible to protect against anything going wrong.
We are still at the early stages of this fascinating debate and development. But one thing is clear to me: CCS is not the answer to the problem of climate change. We need to make very fundamental changes. We need to conserve energy and we need renewable energy. Wales is extremely rich in that resource. CCS is not the green light for going back to coal – even if that was possible or we wanted to. The monster that is Ffos-y-Fran opencast site in Merthyr Tydfil should teach us that.
We have to wait and see whether CCS will work and where it will be used. There has been talk of using old coal mines for storage – which sets alarm bells ringing for me – but for now it’s just talk. If we could use our past legacy in the coalfields of Wales to help ensure a cleaner future I would be the first to welcome it. But we’re nowhere near that yet. Let’s not get carried away.
