Industrial waste
Sir: I endorse your concerns about the closure of Grangemouth and Port Talbot and the statement that ‘if high-quality jobs are to return to the North and the Midlands then re-industrialisation is presumably the answer’ (‘Time for a change’, 12 October). However, your leading article fails to observe that Ed Miliband has already committed £22 billion to the re-industrialisation of Liverpool and Teesside in the form of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) projects.
One might wonder where Miliband acquired the daft notion that it is a good idea to spend £22 billion on a technology that has only been proven to work in a coal-fired power station (a sort we don’t have any more). Even when it works, it substantially increases the cost of the power generated, while sequestering a small quantity of carbon dioxide – which will probably leak from whichever cavern it is subsequently stored in. Perhaps Miliband had been reading the government’s ‘Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy’, published in 2021 while Boris Johnson was PM.
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