The UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, is expected to pledge £20bn towards carbon capture and storage (CCS), as well as label nuclear power as “sustainable”, in the government’s annual budget statement today.
The investment will be in stages of £1bn a year for the next two decades, and is to go towards projects aiming to store 20-30m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2030, equivalent to the emissions of 10-15m cars.
The announcement follows the EU staging the first ever international CCS project last week, piping carbon from a factory in Antwerp into the Danish North Sea.
Hunt will also reclassify nuclear power as “environmentally sustainable”, subject to consultation, looking to encourage greater private sector investment into the sector.
He is also expected to detail UK plans to expand its nuclear sector via “small modular reactors,” a technology which is hoped to deliver cheaper nuclear power to the energy grid.
