Dr. James Glynn:

We recently did work on CCS for the IEA. I will give some high-level figures. There are 17 large carbon capture and storage plants globally, capturing about 13 million tonnes, that is, about half the annual Irish annual CO2 emissions. As Professor Ó Gallachóir said, the IPCC scenarios for the recent special report, SR1.5 are capturing about 200 to 800 billion tonnes of CO2 cumulatively over the whole horizon, so it is almost doubling the remaining carbon budget, giving us space. CCS in power generation costs about $50 to $100 per tonne of CO2. Therefore in the IPCC scenarios it is relatively cheap. However, we see from those models that less and less CCS is coming through in the power sector scenarios. It is largely renewables. Where CCS is being used is in industry. It is about $400 per tonne for steel furnaces and cement process emissions. How do we protect industry which does not have other options to decarbonise or get down to zero CO2 emissions? The Sleipner oil field in Norway is the oldest CCS plant in the world. It has been running since 1996 and captures about 1 million tonnes of CO2 annually. Ireland's chance of CCS is in the Kinsale field, an old gas field which could store 250 million tonnes of CO2 at about a rate of 2 million tonnes per year relatively cheaply. It is probably cheaper than CCS in other countries.