Government Provides a Springboard to UK CCUS Industry with £20 billion for Early Deployment

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), the trade body for the Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) industry in Europe, welcomes today’s Spring Budget 2023 confirmation of £20 billion funding for the UK’s CCUS programme.

The Budget confirms that this funding will kick-start early investment in CCUS “unlocking private investment and job creation across the UK, particularly on the East Coast and in the Northwest of England and North Wales, delivering up to 50,000 highly skilled jobs.”

Ruth Herbert, Chief Executive at the CCSA, said:

“We are delighted to see that the Chancellor has today confirmed £20 billion of funding for CCUS. This marks a turning point for this vital sector, delivering the much-needed certainty to investors that the UK is serious about delivering CCUS.

Today’s announcement means that two years since the launch of the programme, we can now move forward with implementing the initial CCUS clusters. Alongside this, the industry is developing a healthy pipeline of projects to deliver on the government’s net zero strategy in industrial regions all around the UK – these other regions are eagerly awaiting their turn to move forward with carbon capture and storage and will need to see the government commit to further deployment.

We look forward to seeing which projects have been chosen to move to construction, the forward timeline for selecting the next CCUS clusters that need to be operational this decade, and a swift passage of the Energy Bill through Parliament, to finalise the regulatory framework for the industry.”