THE Scottish Government should push Westminster to make companies take responsibility for the CO2 emissions produced by the oil and gas industry, a leading academic has said.
“Make oil companies clean up as they go and then there is no big carbon emission from the hydrocarbon, so we as a country can gain employment from that and the energy benefit, but have no environmental problem,” said professor Stuart Haszeldine, one of the world’s foremost experts on carbon capture.
Speaking to the Sunday National as the Cambo oil field controversy continues, the Edinburgh University professor said he could see a “perfectly cogent argument” that the UK should be seriously thinking about whether to go into more oil and gas production.
His comments came as the UK Government’s rhetoric at COP26 was branded a “sham” when Tim Eggar, chair of regulatory body the Oil and Gas Authority, lamented that the discovery of new oil fields now comes under greater scrutiny because of the climate crisis.
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According to the International Energy Authority, the planet will exceed two degrees of warming just with the oil and gas the world is already committed to producing. That means any extra oil and gas such as the Cambo field going into production would send the world well past that crunch figure.
However, Haszeldine pointed out that companies extracting oil or gas from the ground are not currently made to take responsibility for the emissions. He said that the UK should make it law for them to be responsible for cleaning up the consequences of the oil and gas they produce.
This Carbon Takeback Obligation has been researched at Edinburgh and Oxford universities and would mean that for every tonne of carbon dioxide taken out of the ground as crude oil, the company has to be responsible for putting a tonne of CO2 back into the ground in the same calendar year.
Haszeldine said this could be done through carbon capture and storage, which is what the Acorn project in the north-east of Scotland would deliver – but, like the Peterhead project in 2015 and the Longannet project in 2010, it is in danger of stalling because Westminster has so far refused to fund it.
The professor said that by his calculation, if Siccar Point – the energy company behind Cambo – does take its predicted 170m barrels of oil from the field in the first phase of extraction, it would contain 76 million tonnes of CO2.
“They will say that has never been done before, it’s going to cost us a lot of money, it is impossible,” he said. “But what we should be saying is, actually, we want to behave better and you guys haven’t taken responsible for this in the past, and that is why the world is in such a mess right now.
“This is one of the reasons Acorn is fundamentally important to the industrial future of Scotland. It is fundamentally important to enable this type of CO2 balance to occur where we can carry on making industrial use of fossil hydrocarbons but we can capture and store and eliminate the adverse emissions.”
Haszeldine believes the UK should put the Carbon Takeback Obligation into law.
He said: “I think Scotland should suggest they do this. Make it balanced – because it has never been balanced before and that’s why we’re so out of kilter.”
Addressing claims that carbon capture and storage was not yet possible, Haszeldine said that was a misconception and pointed to Norway where, at one oil field, carbon has been captured since 1996 and injected back into the ground.
“It stores one million tonnes of carbon a year safely and securely,” he said. “Elsewhere around the world another 40 million tonnes of CO2 is captured, separated and stored every year.”
He added that transitioning to renewables would take time so there would still be a demand for oil and gas in Scotland, but as well as carbon capture, operations could also be improved if Norway’s lead was followed by running electricity made from renewable sources to UK platforms which currently use fossil fuels to extract oil and gas.
READ MORE: Scots Tories told to stop 'sitting on their hands' over carbon capture snub
“If we produce our own, we know where it has come from and we can legislate to make production much lower in carbon dioxide emissions,” said Haszeldine.
MEANWHILE, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has rejected criticism from her predecessor that her opposition to the Cambo oil field will cost her politically.
Alex Salmond said that Sturgeon opposing the project is a blow to independence and would lead to thousands of voters in the north-east abandoning the SNP.
Speaking to BBC Scotland, Sturgeon said her stance does not mean those in the sector will be thrown on the “scrap heap”.
She said: “I think that is just an oversimplified analysis of the position, you can’t magic away the climate emergency and anybody who tries to do that is not being fair to this or to future generations.”
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