BP cancels Peterhead clean power plant project

BP has canceled plans for its Peterhead carbon capture power plant, it has been reported. The company has said that a UK government competition on funding would come too late to support the project.

The UK-based oil company said it would drop the project after the UK government's energy white paper, published on Wednesday, stated that selection of plants to receive support would start in November 2007. A BP spokesman said the company understood the government wouldn't come to a decision within 18 months, while the oil field in the project was at the end of its life.

The news comes after last week's announcement that BP and Rio Tinto are creating a clean energy joint-venture that would have included Peterhead. BP was reported to have spent two years developing an industrial-scale, 475- megawatt power plant in Peterhead, Scotland, that uses natural gas as a feedstock. The plant would have separated hydrogen for clean power, while the resulting carbon dioxide would have been piped to the North Sea and buried in an oil field 2.5 miles below the seabed.

Source: Fuel Cell Today