E.ON's decision to shelve plans for a new coal power station at Kingsnorth in Kent has elated environmentalists and activists have been quick to boast victory. But it's obvious that things are not quite what they seem..

Yesterday my Inbox was filling up with messages pouring thick and fast from various groups claiming victory. Most prominently, Greenpeace's Jamie Wooley writes "Kingsnorth shelved but our campaign continues - our campaign and direct actions against dirty coal are only possible with your support - DONATE NOW!". OK, so it's thanks to all this money donated to Greenpeace that this has happened. Mmm.. Let me munch that over. In case we missed the message, it continues: "So we still need your help to make sure we stop ANY new dirty coal power stations and we're already discussing our next steps - in the meantime you can save our climate by making a donation to Greenpeace".

Please do feel free to take a moment to laugh. Thanks God for Greenpeace -- who needs a God if you can have Greenpeace?

So Donate to Greenpeace = save the planet. Very conveniently forgetting that decades ago Greenpeace was, with all good intentions, pivotal in the demise of the use of nuclear energy for electricity generation purposes, which to a large extent got us where we are now, but let's not go into that for the moment.

Next in claiming a share of victory was the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition. They declare: "Well done on Kingsnorth! Bring on The Wave!". Then blah blah about dirty coal, and yes, you guessed, it's not long before we get onto the matter of the Donation.

Funnily enough, the decision at Kingsnorth has nothing to do with these issues and E.ON would have reached the same conclusion regardless. So you can save the donation. E.ON are not saving face when they say that they've reached the decision to delay the project owing to financial considerations, it is quite true - and a very obvious truth to anyone who actually read the nitty-gritty of what the project was supposed to be about.

The project was supposed to be subject to fitting the power station with Carbon Capture and Storage technology (CCS). Currently this technology is only in the prototype stage of testing at approx 3 sites worldwide. Tests have encountered with technical problems as well as local opposition and planning hurdles. It is obvious that there's a long way to go before CCS can go commercial and applied by utilities companies for the provision of electricity at competitive prices. It may be a decade before this happens.

Therefore it defies logic why on earth would a company apply for planning or put forward a project at all on an untested technology that is not ready yet?

Quite simply it wasn't going to happen. Clean coal or CCS will be the holy grail when and if it happens, but the problem, and this is the crux of it, is that it may add a cost of somewhere between £20-£70 to the price of the ton of CO2 captured causing a sky-rocketting of the cost of electricity. The challenge therefore, is one of making the financial proposition make sense, and for the time being it looks that it may not.

Now back to Kingsnorth..

Government minister John O'Brien wrote to our chief executive Mikel Susperregi earlier this year saying that Kingsnorth would only be granted permission to go ahead if fitted with CCS technology. He re-iterated the same point even when it was explained to him that the technology could hardly go ahead within the planning timescale as it is still within an early phase of the testing stage/feasibility study. So the obvious conclusion was that either it would be delayed, or..

...my guess is that E.ON intented to make it look like the good intention was to proceed with CCS, get permission, and after it was all done and dusted make an announcement to the effect that they had problems fitting the CCS after all and that it wouldn't happened as planned etc.. so we would eventually get a dirty coal power station through the back door, just like Olympic budgets escalate in an apparently unpredicted fashion.

Someone somewhere has told that E.ON that the government won't play ball with that -- (which obviously they didn't before?) -- and so the hypothetical CCS Kingsnorth is no more (for the time being).

Brunella

www.carbonica.org