Longannet In The Long Grass

Photo by _gee_

It can come as no surprise to anyone following the story that the Carbon Capture And Storage project at Longannet power station in Fife has been cancelled. In fact, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone since the government leaked details last week that it was in trouble.

We're constantly being told that new coal plants will be "CCS-ready", and therefore will be clean. They should be allowed to be built, based on the politician's great-white-hope that some day in the not-too-distant future they will not be polluting at all.

Unfortunately that political dream has come up against reality. The technical challenges have proven too great for a UK government that won't give you much of a hearing if you're not in the financial services industry, so they have stopped throwing money at it.

With a bit of luck, we can now banish the phrase "clean coal" to the dustbin of history, and the money that would have been used to study CCS should now be ploughed into renewables.