Thereby hangs the problem—it is put back into the atmosphere. These carbon-negative technologies would have to be permanently stored and would have to be over geological timescales, or at least decadal timescales, in order to help in tackling climate change. Of course, CO2
is part of the biosphere but we are talking here about fossilised CO2
that built up over millennia and is being released over a much shortened timescale—a massive chemical experiment that we do not yet know the consequences of.
This could be a rich seam for policymakers and the department, which has already moved a long way in improving the Bill. I certainly hope that if we carry on in this spirit, we will resolve these issues of how to get CCS and CCU deployed so that we can save our industries, attract inward investment and reuse infrastructure sensibly. We could do that through a strategy or the creation of a group—there must be many ways in which this can be done. An Energy Bill should be addressing these issues. They are urgent—we are losing our industrial players—but on the plus side many innovative engineers around the country are coming forward with great ideas. We need to capture that, turn it into something tangible, use it to comply with our obligations and show that we can do decarbonisation at least cost while preserving our industrial might. If we can do that, we shall have an example to show the Premier of China, whom I am sure is grappling with this too.
There is not a single industrialised country that does not now have in its mind how it is going to create steel in a low carbon environment. How is cement going to be produced? What about plastics? We cannot simply ignore that aspect of the decarbonisation challenge. I am not saying that the Government are ignoring it, but we do seriously need to get going now in thinking this through—sooner rather than later—so that we do not see any more unfortunate examples of employers in our heavy industries leaving these shores. We need to keep them here and we need to set incentives for reinvestment. CCSU is one of the few groups of technologies that enables us to do that successfully. We must press on.