Carbon Capture and Storage: Realising the Potential? Pathways and branching points for CCS to 2030 Work Package 3, Task 6 Working Paper

This working paper is an output from a project funded by UKERC (the UK Energy Research Centre) that aims to identify and explore some of the key uncertainties that might have a 5 UK Energy Research Centre material impact on if and when large-scale CCS is deployed in the UK. In particular, this paper proposes a number of plausible pathways for CCS progress (or lack of progress) until 2030 and identifies key branching points where a particular trajectory for CCS development may be determined as different pathways diverge from each other. The effectiveness of different criteria to determine which pathway CCS development is following can then be assessed (see the Methodology section for a more detailed explanation of the approach).

Overall, the project aims to make useful contributions to efforts to determine how both the viability and maturity of CCS technology can be assessed more generally. In this context, viability refers to several factors that are outlined in more detail in later sections of this paper, such as whether independent assessments suggest that CCS technology is performing well enough to compete with other options for mitigating the risk of dangerous climate change. Although maturity is related to similar concepts it is more concerned with how far progressed CCS technology appears to be along a continuum of development, rather than the more yes/no assessment that might be expected if only viability is considered. It is, for instance, possible to envisage that a technology be mature in terms of its development but nevertheless not viable unless a set of economic, policy and regulatory conditions are met.