Energy company E.ON has announced that it will not proceed to the next stage of the Government's carbon capture and storage (CCS) competition.

The company's Kingsnorth project was one of two schemes shortlisted as part of the Government's competition, with the aim being to build the UK's first commercial CCS scheme. But, with the market still not conducive to building the 1,600MW supercritical power station, it had become clear that Kingsnorth could not meet the project timetable.

Dr Paul Golby, Chief Executive of E.ON UK, said: "Having postponed Kingsnorth last year, it has become clear that the economic conditions are still not right for us to progress the project and so, simply put, we have no power station on which to build a CCS demonstration.


"We therefore took the decision to withdraw from the Government's competition because we cannot proceed within the competition timescales.

"As a Group we still believe that carbon capture and storage is a vital technology in the fight against climate change and will now be concentrating our efforts on our Maasvlakte project in the Netherlands as we believe the lessons from that project can be brought back to the UK for future generation CCS projects.

"We would obviously also wish Scottish Power well as they look to develop their own project at Longannet."

The company is currently undertaking a front end engineering and design study at the Kingsnorth project and aims to complete this to gather valuable information on CCS that could be shared more widely.

The existing Kingsnorth power station is due to close by the end of 2015 at the latest under the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive.

(CD)