SSE admits new Peterhead gas plant will belch out more climate pollution

Environmental campaigners are calling for plans for an additional gas-fired power station at Peterhead to be scrapped after SSE admitted the project could increase climate-damaging pollution.

The shocking admission was made in planning documents from SSE responding to environmental regulator SEPA’s questioning of the proposals. In February 2022 SSE and Equinor submitted a planning application to build a new gas fired power station in addition to the existing plant at Peterhead, Aberdeenshire.

SSE conceded that “should both of the plants operate simultaneously this will result in an emissions increase from approx. 1.29MTCO2e to 1.54MTCO2e. This would represent 10.7% of the Scottish Carbon Budget in 2034”

The current Peterhead power station has already been the single most polluting site in Scotland for several years belching out over 1 million tonnes of climate harming gases annually and worsening the climate emergency.

The Peterhead project was further undermined by the failure of the Acorn carbon capture project to secure funding from the UK Government as part of its ‘powering up Britain’ strategy, announced on Thursday, despite CCS being at the heart of that plan.

The revelation comes shortly after another damning UN report which highlights the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels, but the proposed Peterhead plant has a lifespan beyond 2045.

Peterhead could become ‘even greater climate disaster’

Friends of the Earth Scotland climate campaigner Alex Lee said

“SSE’s expansion plans for Peterhead could make Scotland’s biggest polluter into an even greater disaster for our climate.

“SEPA’s questions have forced SSE to admit that their fossil fuelled plans risk increasing climate pollution for years to come, swallowing up huge chunks of our limited carbon budgets and endangering our climate commitments. This admission is an enormous embarrassment for the energy giant and must force any supporters of the project to think again.

“Any plan that locks Scottish households into relying on expensive fossil gas for decades to come will only benefit profiteering oil companies at immeasurable cost to our climate.

“As the UN warns once again of the urgent need to get off fossil fuels, Scotland should be transitioning to powering our lives with renewable energy, not building new oil and gas infrastructure.

“The Scottish Government needs to re-think its energy strategy, end the fantasy that technologies like carbon capture are going to solve the climate crisis, and instead focus on delivering a just transition to a renewable energy economy.

“With full power to determine whether the new Peterhead gas plant should go ahead, and with this clear admission that it will increase climate harm, Humza Yousaf’s new Government must show real climate leadership by rejecting it when the time comes.”

Peterhead Carbon Capture claims called into question

SSE and Equinor claim that they will add Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology to the plant at a later date but the whole project relies on the still unfunded and stalling Acorn Project to transport and store any carbon captured under the North Sea.

SSE refused to answer SEPA’s questions about how efficient the plant would be and for them whether the developers could substantiate predicted carbon capture rates. Without this information Aberdeenshire Councillors will be unable to fulfil their statutory duty to act in a way best calculated to contribute to emissions reductions when the planning application comes before them.

Carbon capture and storage technology has a long and troubled history and has consistently failed to deliver on projected emissions reductions. The Peterhead project has been put forward despite advice to the Scottish Government from leading climate scientists and energy experts that CCS is an unnecessary technology in the power sector.

Recent evidence has come to light that the longest running CCS plant in the world, the Boundary Dam coal power and CCS plant in Canada, was capturing at a rate of 44% in 2022 compared to projected rates of 90% due to a series of breakdowns. The project cost $1.5 billion Canadian dollars, relies on coal and uses the carbon captured to extract more oil.