14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, multinational oil and gas company Shell went public with the news that it had inked a deal expected to yield major environmental benefits with the United Kingdom Government.
The deal in question refers to Shell's being given the green light to implement a carbon capture project at a gas-fired power station currently operating in the country.
In a press release on the matter at hand, the oil and gas company details that the station that is to be fitted with carbon capture technology under this agreement is dubbed Peterhead.
The facility is located in Aberdeenshire and, once equipped with said technology, it would help keep roughly one million tonnes of carbon dioxide out of our planet's atmosphere on a yearly basis.
Interestingly enough, Shell claims that this carbon capture project at a gas-fired power station is the first of its kind to have until now been announced on a global scale.
“Shell has signed an agreement with the UK Government to progress the Peterhead Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) project to the next phase of design,” the multinational oil and gas company writes on its website.
“If successful, the project will represent the first industrial-scale application of CCS technology at a gas power station anywhere in the world,” it further details.
Shell estimates that, thanks to this project, the Peterhead gas-fired power plant is to have a clean energy output equivalent to the overall demand of as many as 500,000 households in the United Kingdom.
“This will generate enough clean electricity to power the equivalent of 500,000 homes a year,” the company says. Click Green tells us that, after being captured on site, the carbon dioxide emissions that the Peterhead gas-fired power plant produces on a yearly basis are to be stored under the sea.
Both Shell and the United Kingdom Government expect that, once disposed of in this manner, said emissions will no longer contribute to ongoing phenomena such as climate change and global warming.
Commenting on this initiative, the current Chairman of Shell UK, Ed Daniels, said that, “The project has the potential to make gas, already the cleanest burning fossil fuel, even cleaner.”
He further argued that, all things considered, the success of this project would be proof that carbon capture technologies could help put a leash on climate change and global warming, while making sure that the increase in global power demand was properly dealt with.
As he put it, “CCS could be critical to reducing carbon emissions at a time of growing global demand for energy. The successful demonstration of the technology at Peterhead would be a step towards proving its commercial viability as a tool for mitigating climate change.”
Shell says that, according to its estimates, work on this project will begin sometime towards the end of this decade.