Mr. Brendan Murphy:

On CCS, there is a perception that it is expensive but we do not agree. For clean, dispatchable power, it is just what we need. While we need wind, we also need dispatchable power for when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine. By any measure, the cheapest way of providing that is with CCS and it is not just us who say that. The International Energy Agency has predicted that the cost of decarbonising the power sector will be $3.5 trillion more without CCS, while the European Commission has estimated that it will cost €1.2 trillion more to do the same in Europe. The UK Committee on Climate Change recently published a report on achieving net zero carbon emissions for the UK that found that CCS is a "necessity not an option". The UK Department of Energy recently launched a consultation on how to incentivise CCS for power, industry and so on. It indicated that the cost of power would be between £70 and £77 sterling per MW/h for clean, dispatchable power, which is a cheap price by any measure. There is much evidence that CCS will be very cheap and competitive compared with any alternative dispatchable power, which is crucial.

There are two ways of producing hydrogen. One, which is often called blue hydrogen, involves splitting natural gas into hydrogen and CO2, after which the latter is stored. In that case, CCS will nonetheless be needed to store the CO2 and it is likely to be much cheaper than the alternative, namely, green hydrogen, although in the long term, that will be an important part of the mix. It involves, for example, using wind turbines to produce electricity or using electrolysis to make hydrogen. In the long term, that is, after 2100, it will doubtless become an essential part of the economy. It is a matter of timing. I would like to think that over the next 20 to 50 years, the switch will be from blue to green hydrogen. All the evidence suggests that to increase scale in the next 20 years, blue hydrogen will have to be used. We will have to split natural gas into CO2 and hydrogen, which means-----