The year-long study was completed for the ETI by consultancies Pale Blue Dot Energy, Axis Well Technology and Costain with some $5 million in government funding from the Department of Energy and Climate Change.

The report found that the UK Continental Shelf can provide a vast national offshore CO2 storage resource, which can be made readily available without having to undertake extensive appraisal programs thanks to decades of oil and gas exploration and development activity.

The project has built on data from CO2 Stored – the UK’s CO2 storage atlas – a database which was created from the ETI’s UK Storage Appraisal Project, which is now being further developed by government’s The Crown Estate and the British Geological Survey.

This project identified 20 specific CO2 storage sites from a potential 579 that could host around 78,000 million tonnes of CO2, with just 15% able to store a century of emissions.

Five sites were studied in detail and all were found to be suitable for storing CO2 emissions from both power and industry projects around the UK and mainland Europe.

Only two of the five sites would need further appraisal drilling before any investment decision was required.

“The results from this project have confirmed the understanding that there are no major technical hurdles to moving industrial scale CO2 storage forward in the UK. Indeed the UK could form the basis of a storage resource that could service the needs of many parts of Europe in addition to its own needs,” ETI’s CCS program manager Andrew Green said.

“The five sites featured in the study, along with three others developed previously, could collectively store over 1.5 gigatonnes of CO2, and could be fully operational as early as 2030 which would be enough to service a significant roll out of commercial projects, including up to 10 gigawatts of power generation and major industrial sources fitted with CCS, as highlighted in earlier ETI analysis.

“This would represent the development of only 2% of the UK’s national storage resource potential.

“Our view is that CCS should still play an important role in the long-term decarbonisation of the UK energy system and continues to offer the lowest cost solution to meeting the UK’s legally binding 2050 climate change targets.”

The report recommends that further work takes place to build the business case for CCS and CO2 storage in the UK and calls for more research to be undertaken to reduce the ongoing cost of storing CO2.

There should also be more work to further develop confidence among investors and the public on the technologies used to plan, operate and monitor safe CO2 storage sites in UK waters.

The ETI published a report last year which said the UK has an opportunity to build a CCS sector capable of reducing the costs of meeting its carbon targets, by exploiting the UK’s offshore engineering capabilities and safeguarding the future of key energy-intensive industries.

According to the ETI’s analysis, if either CCS or bioenergy do not feature in the UK’s future energy system it would at least double the cost of delivering climate change targets from around 1% of GDP to 2% by 2050.

Green said the value of CCS or bioenergy to the UK energy system is $400 billion each.

If neither are developed it is difficult to see how the UK would be able to decarbonise at least cost, Green said.