World Wildlife Fund describes Peel Group’s Hunterston carbon capture application as the worst they’ve seen

Last week saw the rejection of the plans to turn Longannet Power Station in Fife into the UK’s first carbon capture and storage operation.

Now the long criticised plan to build such a plant at Hunterston in North Ayrshire – just across the Clyde from Dunoon and(WWF) – with evidence in plenty to substantiate their stance.

Rob Edwards of The Sunday Herald, had an exclusive at the weekend, focusing on WWF’s informed analysis of the proposal from Ayrshire Power, a subsidiary of Peel Group, who own Clydeport which, in a questionable deal with government complicity, came to own Hunterston and much of the land on the banks of the Clyde.

WWF has pointed to a series of profound errors of understanding in the company’s proposal. These worrying errors could not be more central to the exercise and to public concerns.

The errors span issues from carbon capture itself to pollution and wildlife.

The Director of WWF, Dr Richard Dixon, told the Sunday Herald that, as well as ‘contradictory figures and sloppy mistakes’, the proposal showed ‘uncertainty about the most basic parameters of the plant’.

He is quoted as saying – in evidence every bit as forensically damning as that just given in California by Dr Steven Shafer in the trial of Dr Conrad Murray for the manslaughter of singer Michael Jackson.

Dr Dixon is quoted as saying that, in the proposal, Ayrshire Power:
▪ ‘… get their scientific units wrong by a factor of a thousand’ – raising concerns as to the physical consequences of such a measurement mistake being made in operation;
▪ ‘… can’t divide one number by another’ – which hardly offers reassurance as to the precision of any physical operation they might mount;
▪ ‘… don’t know what our climate targets are’ – which, given that carbon capture is designed to remove and bury carbon that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere, is a centrally relevant deficiency;
▪ ‘ and, of special amusement in Argyll, ‘… can’t tell the difference between the UK’s largest bird (the white tailed sea eagle) and a small moorland bird (the wheatear)’.

The Peel Group / Ayrshire Power proposal was going before a hearing at North Ayrshire Councll yesterday and is to go to full council for a decision on 9th November 2011.

Major problems for the Longannet proposal were cost and the length of pipeline needed to pipe the captured carbon emissions ‘under the sea’. (This technology also depends on burying our toxic detritus for the confounding of future generations.)

Given that the Longannet proposal had much greater competence, it is unlikely that these problems will have been resolved for the Ayrshire Power scenario.

It is hard to envisage what evidence and what logic would allow North Ayrshire Council to approve this proposal for Hunterston when Longannet could not succeed.

If the Council should suffer a rush of blood to the brain and approve the proposal, the matter is not likely to rest there. Rob Edwards describes the proposal as ‘the most opposed application in Scottish planning history – pointing to over 20,000 objections and threats of legal action.