The Bhopal boy set to prove David Cameron wrong on carbon capture

“I have seen first hand what can happen if pollution is not controlled,” says Aniruddha Sharma. The Indian entrepreneur was born in Bhopal, where his parents’ wedding took place three days before the catastrophic chemical leak in 1984 that killed thousands and injured many more. All of Sharma’s extended family were in the city for the wedding celebration, he says: “Everybody was affected.” Sharma says the experience is the source of his drive to tackle another great environmental crisis: climate change. Sharma’s company, Carbon Clean Solutions, is backed by £3.4m UK government funding, has a laboratory at Imperial College London and aims to make capturing carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels affordable. The company’s technology – a special chemical – is currently being evaluated at the world’s biggest carbon capture test site in Norway and by companies in Europe, India and the US. Making carbon capture and storage (CCS) work is seen as vital by both the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the UK’s official advisers, the Committee on Climate Change. Halting global warming without CCS will be twice as costly, they say. But the UK’s Conservative government recently cancelled its £1bn CCS demonstration competition, despite an election manifesto pledge backing it and shortly before a global agreement on climate change was agreed in Paris. On Wednesday, Angus MacNeil, the chair of the energy and climate change select committee of MPs criticised the decision as a false economy, calling it “penny wise, pound foolish”. Shadow energy minister, Barry Gardiner, described it as “environmental and economic insanity”. David Cameron, who often previously cited the £1bn CCS plan as evidence of his government’s green credentials, explained the U-turn to MPs on Wednesday. “In government you have to make tough choices. You have to make decisions about technology that works and technology that is not working [and] we made the right choice.” Plenty of people disagree, however. Leading figures, including former Environment Agency chair Lord Chris Smith, said this week the government’s new dash for gas and in particular its fast-tracking of fracking makes little sense without CCS to capture and bury emissions. “You will have to apply CCS to gas plants to have a hope in hell of having a decarbonised electricity supply by 2040,” says Prof Colin Snape, a CCS expert at the University of Nottingham. He told the Guardian: “Without CCS making a significant contribution, it is going to make hitting any kind of climate change target very hard.” Sharma agrees: “It will be very challenging, especially for industry, to survive without CCS.” He laments the government’s ditching of the £1bn CCS competition: “From the macro point of view, it was not very good news for our company. When something like this happens, investor confidence is shaken.” But Sharma remains confident CCS is needed and that his company’s technology will prove Cameron wrong by delivering affordable CCS quickly. “It is now without question, following the Paris climate change agreement, that CCS is going to be necessary,” he says. “The UK government’s decision to cancel the £1bn competition will not stop the development of CCS. Our technology can stand on its own feet with proper customer funding.” Carbon dioxide has been scrubbed from natural gas streams for decades using amines, but these are corrosive, polluting and use a lot of energy. An alternative is to use salts, but these are slow to react. Sharma’s company is in the process of patenting its chemical, which combines advantages of both and he says will cut costs to as little as £30 per tonne of CO2 captured. In September, the company raised another £3.4m from UK investors, led by Eldon Capital Management. “The technology significantly improves the economics of CO2 capture,” says Jan Petzel of Eldon Capital. Prof Snape also says the company’s approach is promising. “It probably represents the best you can do with first generation technology,” he says. “But you will need to see it working at realistic scale to convince everyone.” Second generation CCS technologies include membranes and solids currently being investigated in laboratories. Sharma anticipates signing the company’s first commercial deal in the UK in 2016. In contrast, energy secretary Amber Rudd told MPs on Wednesday: “CCS will be necessary in the long-term to deliver on a really low carbon future. That could be in the 2050s, 2060s, 2070s. Now for the UK, it was not the right time to commit to £1bn.”