In 2019, a partnership between BP and German energy provider ENBW agreed to pay £231m ($290m) in annual option fees alone.
While the offshore wind industry is booming, Crown Estate is already eyeing its next opportunity to tap into its undersea empire: carbon storage. There is room for 78 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to be stored on the sea floor around the UK. That’s enough space to cram 200 years’ worth of the country’s annual emissions. The North Sea is increasingly seen as a destination to store carbon captured from hard-to-decarbonize industries such as steel, cement and fertilizer production.
“As the science on climate change advances, we realize that decarbonizing the power sector itself is not enough. We also need to do that,” said Jonathan Pearce, British Geological Survey’s carbon storage team leader.
The North Sea remains the center of the UK’s fossil fuel industry, but could come to play an important role in the country’s decarbonization plans. In 2019, the Climate Change Commission (the public body that advises governments) said that in order for the UK to reach its legally binding target of achieving net zero emissions of greenhouse gases, carbon capture and concluded that storage was a “need, not an option.” 2050.
But carbon storage plans have gotten off to a rocky start, says Eshin Selin, a policy analyst at the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. In 2011 and 2015, he said, the government canceled large-scale carbon capture and storage projects, prompting criticism that the UK was lagging behind in exploiting its natural storage assets. That is starting to change. The government’s pledge to achieve net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide “was a turning point in carbon capture, utilization and storage,” Selin says.
The UK has set a target of capturing up to 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually by 2030, and the first carbon capture clusters will be centered around industrial towns and cities in the North East and North West of England. increase. “There is now a real global race going on over who will reap the industrial and economic benefits from the world’s efforts to achieve net zero emissions,” says Selin.
This means that the Crown Estate now sits on top of another valuable asset deep in the ocean. The estate is responsible for granting the rights to store carbon dioxide on the sea bed around England, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as leasing pipelines to transport carbon dioxide to these underground reservoirs, mostly in the North Sea. Storage licenses are approved by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), the public agency that regulates the North Sea oil, gas and carbon storage industry.
So far, the NTSA has granted seven licenses to subsea carbon storage around England. As one of these licenses granted to Shell in 2013 expired, there are now six activated carbon storage licenses, covering five sites in the North Sea and one site in the Irish Sea in the west of England. In September 2022, the NSTA closed its first public round of tenders for carbon storage licenses after receiving bids from 19 companies for the 13 carbon storage sites it presented. However, companies wishing to transport and store carbon on the seafloor will have to purchase rights from Crown Estate. , and Equinor New Energy, is a chunk of the North Sea being explored for its carbon storage potential.
