Seòmar agus comataidhean

I am very grateful, convener. Good morning, gentlemen.

I will pick up on your progress report, in which you say, about the climate change plan update, that you

“have not been able to establish whether and how policies and proposals add up to the required emissions reductions.”

Does the Scottish Government now have the right tools and models to quantify how the policies that you have talked about

“add up to the required emissions reductions”?

I will be as brief as possible. I have two direct questions for Erik Dalhuijsen. First, Oil & Gas UK’s “Energy Transition Outlook 2021” reports that there is a total capacity to hold 78 billion tonnes of CO₂ under the North Sea and the Irish Sea. As I understand it, that is approximately 190 times greater than the UK’s annual emissions of 400 million tonnes. Even if we were to accept all the concerns that you have raised, given those figures, ought we to be not only exploring carbon capture, utilisation and storage but ramping it up, rather than holding back?

Thank you.

I will be brief and direct a question to Alan James, who just talked about emissions. In Erik Dalhuijsen’s written submission to the committee, he said that we need

“98% to 100% capture efficiency … to achieve net-zero emissions when dealing with fossil carbon.”

He suggested that capture efficiency was currently running at about 60 per cent. Is he right on one or both of those assertions? In any event, how might we anticipate efficiency improving over time?

I have a very brief question arising from the remarks that we have just heard. Professor Haszeldine, can you confirm that the selection criteria were all known about and set out very clearly in advance, that all the interested parties for the programmes pitched against those criteria and that the scores were allocated against those criteria? I just want to be clear on that.

You mentioned direct air capture. I met Carbon Engineering Ltd last week and it introduced me to that idea. I found that pretty exciting, because it sounded as though, in effect, you take excess carbon emissions from the air and sequester them. Is that right? If so, is it not game changing for what we can achieve in keeping heating as low as possible?

I am very grateful for that answer. I have no further questions at this stage, convener.

I am grateful for that.

Moving on, I will focus on figures again, because that seems to be what we have to work with. We have spoken a lot about hydrogen and your concern about creating fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency has various scenarios in which it anticipates that hydrogen will meet 10 per cent of global energy consumption by 2050. The IEA seems to suggest that 40 per cent of that hydrogen will come from natural gas facilities that are equipped with CCUS—that is, blue hydrogen. If that is right, does it not suggest that the technology must proceed to ensure that we get to the hydrogen economy that I think most of us are looking to get towards?

My question is for Mike Tholen. Mark Ruskell asked about putting carbon under, say, the North Sea, but there was some disagreement between members of the earlier panel about what happens to it once it is there and, indeed, the integrity of anything that you put under the sea. It might come out, or it might not. Can you reassure the committee that, once carbon has been captured and sequestered properly, it is not going to come back out again or have certain negative consequences that we heard about earlier?