Up in Smoke

Len Tingle Editor Politics Show Yorkshire and Lincolnshire

Yorkshire's coal-fired power stations create some of the largest amounts of air pollution in Western Europe. An ambitious scheme to capture and permanently store millions of tons of carbon dioxide has been proposed- we ask whether or not it can be achieved.

On the picturesque Easington beach on the East coast of Yorkshire, dog walkers and late season paddlers pass by hardly noticing the small industrial plant perched on the sandy cliff above them.

In fact this is one of the most important places for landing natural gas in England.

Pipe lines come ashore here from under the North Sea. A new one even runs all the way from Norway.

Capture, store and forget

This is an untried technical answer that really has a much simpler solution Stephen Norieko

Under a major scheme proposed by the government-funded regional development agency, Yorkshire Forward, that process would be reversed.

Carbon dioxide coming from coal fired power stations and any other big industrial polluter would be converted into liquid, then through a network of pipes, pumped back into abandoned North Sea gas and oil wells to be sealed in forever.

"I have some misgivings," says Stephen Norieko of East Yorkshire's Friends of the Earth, in an interview with the Politics Show's Len Tingle.

"This is an untried technical answer that really has a much simpler solution. Just cut back on the amount of energy we use," he insists.

Plugging the gap

The biggest problem isn't the storage it is capturing the carbon dioxide in the first place Prof Bruce Yardley

The government says there will be an "electricity gap" if we have to shut down coal-fired power stations in the next decade because they are too dirty.

Capturing the carbon dioxide emissions will give them a new lease of life.

However, there is a long way to go before what would be the world's biggest carbon capture scheme could be launched.

"The biggest problem isn't the storage it is capturing the carbon dioxide in the first place," says Bruce Yardley, Professor of Metamorphic Geochemistry at the University of Leeds - as the camera caught up with him, in the shadow of Europe's largest coal-fired power station at Drax near Selby.

"It hasn't been done on this scale before," he says, "and it would take and a great deal of expense and time to retrofit the power stations with the equipment required.

"I wouldn't expect to see any of this in place until 2030 at the earliest.

"By that time the current generation of power stations are obsolete so it might be better to start with new one from scratch."

In the week that the European Union tightens the screw on industrial emissions and green house gasses, Clare Frisby and the Politics Show team look at how we can keep the electric lights on and meet all our pollution targets.

That's the Politics Show for Yorkshire Lincolnshire and the North Midlands, Sundays from 12:00 BST on BBC One