E.ON UK, the U.K. arm of German utility E.ON AG (EOA.XE), said Monday its Kingsnorth coal-fired project will be one of the projects to apply for funding under the U.K. government's carbon capture and storage competition.
Carbon capture and sequestration or storage, also known as CCS, is the storage of carbon dioxide in rock formations, which prevents CO2 from entering the atmosphere and causing global warming.
In October last year, the U.K. government said it would launch a competition to finance the construction within seven years of one post-combustion commercial scale carbon capture and storage project.
E.ON U.K. is planning to build two coal-fired units to replace existing coal units at the Kingsnorth site in southeast England. The two units would have combined capacity of about 1.6 gigawatts.
The government is believed to be earmarking about GBP300 million in funding for the project.
Post-combustion means capturing the carbon after the coal is burnt for storage instead of pre-combustion technology, where a chemical process is used to break up the coal, allowing CO2 emissions to be captured before power generation and siphoned underground for storage.
Environmental protesters said earlier this month that they will stage a week of protests in August at the Kingsnorth coal-fired power plant in Kent.
"By making it clear we will use our proposed Kingsnorth site to develop CCS technology, we are addressing one of the fundamental issues in the whole debate: how can we demonstrate that carbon capture works on a commercial scale unless we first build a station which is CCS-ready and then fit the technology to that station?" Paul Golby, Chief Executive of E.ON UK said in a statement Monday.
Adding, "Moreover, how can we expect other nations such as China or India to adopt carbon capture technology unless we can demonstrate that it can be retrofitted?"
Environmental groups say that if Kingsnorth is given the go-ahead it will open the way to build more coal-fired power plants, with up to seven similar projects planned for the U.K. Coal-fired plants, without carbon capture, are the most carbon-intensive types of power plants.