16 January 2025
Gas Plant Profile: Peterhead, Scotland
PROJECT: New 900 MW combined cycle gas turbine on the site of an operational 1180 MW fossil gas plant, already Scotland’s biggest polluter. Promises to capture at least 90% of CO2 emissions through CCS, an unproven and expensive technology.
LOCATION: Peterhead, Scotland
UTILITY: SSE and Equinor
STATUS: Environmental Impact Assessment finalised. Facing opposition across Scotland as it would result in the country missing its climate targets.
Map data: ©2024 Google, © Airbus | The existing Peterhead power plant image: © Bill Harrison
In February 2022, power utilities SSE and Equinor applied to build a 900 MW fossil gas power plant with carbon capture at Peterhead, Aberdeenshire. There is a 1180 MW operational gas unit on the site, which has been Scotland’s biggest single polluter for the past five years and for which there are no closure plans.
The Scottish Government already missed 8 of its last 12 legally enshrined climate targets. Planning documents submitted by the developer show that “should both plants (at the site) operate simultaneously this will result in emissions increase [that] would represent 10.7 percent of the Scottish Carbon Budget in 2034.”
The project also proposes deploying carbon capture and storage (CCS) in order to capture at least 90 percent of CO2 emissions, a feat which has not yet been consistently achieved by any project in the world. CCS has a long history of failure. It’s a costly technology not only to build, but also to run due to its energy-intensity which reduces the plant’s efficiency. In fact, Peterhead has already been the site of a failed CCS project, which cost UK taxpayers GBP 100 million before the UK government cancelled it.
Friends of the Earth Scotland has been leading the opposition to this unnecessary project, organising a protest at the SSE’s AGM in July 2024 where it called out the company’s greenwashing and the “devastating impact of high energy bills driven by the price of gas on families in Scotland”.
In October 2024, 350.org and Friends of the Earth Scotland handed the Scottish Government a petition, urging them to reject plans for the new Peterhead unit. The petition, which has gathered an impressive 13 000 signatures so far, argues that “the new development will undermine a just transition to renewable energy by extending our reliance on fossil fuels for another 25 years”.
Expert research published by Carbon Tracker in October 2024 shows that the project could generate five times more climate pollution than the Environmental Impact Assessment estimates. The research considers a 75 percent carbon capture rate, as well as the higher emissions from LNG imports, which have a significant carbon footprint and are expected to become the norm as the North Sea gas reserves are exhausted.
What Peterhead truly needs instead is a just transition plan. Power plant workers are not guaranteed future employment since so much of the new Peterhead project hinges on the highly automatised CCS unit. Furthermore, over 75 percent of the construction jobs for the new unit will not be filled by people in the Aberdeenshire area.