Life On The Road

The project is already causing controversy as environmental campaigners continue to push to reduce Britain's heavy dependency on fossil fuels for its power. One of the selling points though is that Dong have an emissions-cleaning system that will allegedly reduce pollution by up to 25%, but in my opinion this will only slow down the problem, not eliminate it. They also plan to prepare Hunterston for carbon capture which apparently pumps emissions for storage in emptying oil wells (North Sea oil wells?) resulting in claimed cuts in emission by 90%. However, it seems that the technology's only known to work on paper and is not necessarily commercially viable. In addition, isn't it a bit of a risk to try it out on British soil, especially when Dong already admit that "DONG Energy accounts for around one-third of Danish CO2 emissions, primarily due to our power and heat generation plants based on coal and other fossil fuels". There's an admission of this in their Carbon Capture and Storage page: "Technically, it is possible to capture CO2, but it is still a very energy-intensive process. Today, power plants use 5% of the energy they produce to clean for sulphur and NOx. Cleaning for CO2 as well using the existing technologies would require 15%-25% of the energy produced. That is why research currently centres on developing processes that are a lot less energy-intensive". So in reality, the process is still at the working model stage and it consumes up to 30% of the total energy produced?

As for the plant itself, they state that "..when our coal-fired units are operating at their most efficient, we are able to utilise around 45% of the fuel’s energy content. On a global scale, the average energy utilisation is only around 31%". This is a very poor return on energy investment in my opinion, but it's likely that Dong will go ahead with it.

Dong is is proposing a joint venture company with Peel Energy, a sister company of Clydeport which operates the Hunterston port. Peel's talking head, Owen Michaelson, states: "It makes perfect sense to build a new power station there, avoiding the need to transport millions of tonnes of coal a year across the country". Maybe, but it's no coincidence surely that Peel is a large stakeholder in UK Coal who I'm sure would be only too pleased to have that quantity of coal transported across the country, perhaps even by ship? Is it also coincidence that Owen Michaelson is a non-executive director of UK Coal?

What really intrigues me about all this though is that according to the power-industry web site, powertechnology.com are featuring an article on Hunterston in its nuclear role, and state that the life of the plant has been extended to 2016 while at the same time "generating enough power to supply 50% of Scottish homes". It's also been working at just 60% efficiency but there are plans to spend GBP 90 million to increase this to 70%+ along with a sister plant, Hinkley Point B. At this point in time the economic don't seem to add up, and the easy option that will also be the worst for the environment appears to be the course being followed. Even the government said that "Nuclear power was declared 'safe and affordable' in January 2008 ( business secretary John Hutton)", so the government's obviously convinced that nuclear power is the way to go for the foreseeable future: its not perfect of course, but given that the fossil fuel coal is getting such bad press and is such a threat it would be foolhardy not to adopt it.

So there are some very mixed messages coming out of all this - I'll wait and see what happens over the next few weeks and post again.