"There are areas like farming and aircraft travel where it is tougher to drive down emissions, so other areas will have to go negative to meet the target," said prof Gibbins. The term 'negative' is confusing but it essentially means combining CCS with bioenergy. The accord was signed by 195 countries, led by the US and China. It makes no difference whether you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming. The deal constitutes the political will of the world, and will be legally-binding in the sense that each state transposes its commitments into domestic law. It is possible that Donald Trump will be elected US president and that the global consensus will unravel. But Britain cannot make strategic plans based on what a putative President Trump might or might not do, and I write this article on the assumption that COP21 will remain the global framework. A study of Britain's CCS potential for the old Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) concluded that there are five optimal sites that can meet the UK's needs and service Europe. "There are no major technical hurdles. The UK is endowed with offshore geology that presents a superlative national CO2 storage proposition," it said. The cradle-to-grave "levelised unit cost" of transport and storage (not the separate CCS process itself) ranges from £11 to £18 per tonne of CO2, adding £5 to £9 per megawatt hour (MWh) to electricity costs.
The UK 's offshore geology presents a "superlative national CO2 storage proposition," but the British government needs to act to avoid missing out, according to Gibbins , writing in the Telegraph . Industrial clusters in the Tees Valley and the Humber are linked by a network of pipelines to depleted oil and gas fields in the Tees Valley , with similar assets for carbon storage deep underground in UK and CO2 in Scotland . Low government borrowing costs make investing in CCS all the more attractive.