³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ

More than £100m in European funding could be sunk in the North Sea before too long.

Word out of Brussels has it that a 75 million euro grant is to be recommended by the Commission for voting through by the European Parliament to back a Scottish and Southern Energy project.

This is to place a high-voltage sub-sea transmission line and hub under its planned offshore marine farms off north-east Scotland.

Another 40 million euros is being earmarked for the Wind Deployment Centre - 10 large turbines proposed for sites close to shore off Aberdeen, currently facing some planning opposition.

The project has already been scaled back, and is more for testing kit than for large-scale generation.

This fund is part of the European priority spending on improved renewables, carbon-reducing technologies and energy security, much of which is going into gas supply routes that avoid dependence on Russia.

The North Sea is a focus for Brussels' thinking on renewables.

But it's reported that the Commission has not been sufficiently impressed by prospects for carbon capture and storage based on Longannet power station to put the Fife coal-burner on its shortlist of approved projects.

Instead, Hatfield in Yorkshire seems to have been given the nod for European funding.

The official line is that Hatfield was at an advantage because it includes a new-build power plant.

Longannet is seen as an attractive place to test carbon capture technology because the emissions are already being belched out by the Scottish Power giant. It may have been that the European Commission saw beyond it for that reason.

The bigger prize is a pot of UK government funding that is far in excess of anything likely to come to Britain out of Brussels. Ministers are dangling as much as £1bn in front of projects for carbon capture testing, and they're running a competition to see which should get the funding.

It has been a slow process. The first plan was for a new power station at Peterhead.

For various reasons, BP lost interest and walked away. Now Scottish Power and Scottish and Southern Energy are among the competitors to win the funding and get ahead with the technology.

The notion is that carbon emissions can be captured, treated and turned into a chemical compound, then pumped out to sea and buried deep under the seabed.

The notion was also that this could fill emptying oil wells, and might even have the by-product of displacing the remaining deposits in old oil reservoirs.

The reality, from research commissioned by the Scottish government, is that the oil wells are not ideal, but that there are aquifers under the seabed that could be used for carbon storage - enough identified so far for 200 years of Scottish coal-burning power generation.

The other factor, which enthusiasts prefer to overlook, is that it currently ranks as the most expensive way of reducing carbon emissions, and by a long way, quite apart from being an unproven technology.

The British intention is to build and operate a test site, in the hope that it will work and can be attached to the next generation of coal-burning power stations.

That test may not be complete until 2020, and a lot of decisions about Britain's energy future will have to be made before then.

The competition to get there first is international, and since the change of regime in the White House, the USA is seeing immense amounts of effort going into carbon-reducing research and development.

It's worth noting that last week saw the first application of carbon capture technology at a commercial coal-burning power plant. It was in West Virginia.