THE UK Government is being urged to keep a commitment – made in the run up to the independence referendum – to help launch a £1 billion green energy project which would create hundreds of jobs north of the Border.

Ahead of the September 2014 vote, David Cameron signed an agreement in Aberdeen to support the delivery of a £1 billion carbon capture scheme in Peterhead. It was promised the initiative would bring 600 jobs, providing a major boost to the area’s economy.

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However, a year after the No vote, Chancellor George Osborne dramatically announced he was axing plans for £1bn grant for developing CCS technology. An outcry followed with industry figures hitting out at the decision.

A Shell spokesman said at the time: “Shell is disappointed at the withdrawal of funding for the CCS Commercialisation Competition, in which our Peterhead CCS project was one of the final contenders. We have worked tirelessly over the last two years to progress our plans for this project.

“It has the potential to bring huge value to the UK, both in terms of immediate emissions reductions and developing knowledge for the benefit of a wider industry.”

Amid the uproar Tory ministers set up a taskforce to examine the issue again, with the body publishing its findings earlier this year. It identified Peterhead as having “key potential” for the project due to its links with the oil and gas industry.

Last night Stewart Stevenson, the SNP MSP for Banffshire and Buchan Coast, said despite the taskforce’s conclusion, no commitment had been made by the UK Government to advance the scheme in Peterhead.

He also pointed out there had been no funding update for it presented in the Chancellor’s Budget.

“The potential for Peterhead as the UK’s prime site for carbon capture and storage is in absolutely no doubt. The UK government’s own report identifies its ‘unique potential’,” he said.

“But sadly, successive UK Governments have kicked CCS around like a political football.

"They used the promise of £1 billion investment as a bung in the 2014 referendum. Then they betrayed people in Buchan by scrapping the project a year later.

“Fast-forward another three years and it’s back on the table. But despite the UK government’s enthusiasm for the project in July, there’s been no signs of progress since – no deal signed, no timescale and no funding committed by the Chancellor in last week’s Budget.

“It was a huge missed opportunity. It’s high time the Tories got their finger out – invested in this technology to meet our climate change obligations, invested the billion they promised in the North East and delivered new jobs to boost the region.”

The concept behind the scheme is to collect greenhouse gas emissions from power stations and pump the captured carbon dioxide underground, preventing it reaching the atmosphere.

Those backing the plan said CO2 could be pumped down existing pipelines into reservoirs beneath the North Sea.

Last year Professor Stuart Haszeldine of Edinburgh University and a director of Scottish Carbon Capture and Storage (SCCS), the UK’s biggest CCS research group, said technology was sufficiently advanced to launch the scheme.

He explained scientific development would enable them to pump captured carbon dioxide (CO2) down existing pipelines from the St Fergus gas terminal in Aberdeenshire.

He said CO2 could be pumped into rock formations in the central North Sea from gas pipelines which are currently not in use and are awaiting decommissioning.

CO2 could also be pumped to St Fergus from Grangemouth where emissions could be captured from the petrochemicals plants, the professor said.

No one from the Treasury could be reached for a comment.