Chamber and committees

I ask Phil Raines to come in.

Can I go to the analyst to answer the question, so that you can get a level of detail, Mr Matheson?

The Government has a number of vehicles for checking our progress. We need to report to Parliament on our progress every year, and we have a Cabinet sub-committee, the climate delivery framework oversight group—which includes the Cabinet Secretary for Finance and Local Government, transport, climate action, the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities environment and economy spokesperson and its vice-president and Scottish Cities Alliance representation. Obviously, we work with local government on that. We have set up the climate intelligence service to assist local government, and it produces a lot of the advice for each sector on where emissions occur and on what work needs to be done.

We have our regular Cabinet sub-committee on climate change and, at director level, the director for net zero has oversight of all the portfolios, with the exception of housing, which sits in another portfolio but reports directly. Those portfolios are climate change, agriculture, transport, forestry, marine, rural economy and energy. Those are the Government vehicles.

More broadly, Cabinet reports on that, and there are regular updates to the Parliament—the statements to Parliament on the progress that has been made, based on all the analysis that has been done in all those areas using internal mechanisms within Government.

You have just set out the issue that was in front of us as soon as we decided that having policies to reduce livestock numbers was a no-go area for the climate change plan. We then looked at what had to happen in terms of emissions reduction. We reconvened all the cabinet secretaries, who had the opportunity to produce and offer more policies in that area to make up for that decision.

Carbon capture, use and storage was considered along with negative emissions technologies in my portfolio. We looked at how much further we could go in that area. I was very clear with my officials that we wanted to look at areas in which there was potential for innovation and growth in an economic space.

In particular, my thanks go to Ms Hyslop for coming back with a raft of new policies that she worked on with her transport officials, including on the ramping up of EV use, the additional support for a more rapid roll-out of EV charging points and the EV infrastructure fund of £30 million. I know that she went through all that with the committee last week.

In addition, Ms Hyslop is considering the issue of 24 additional public charging points by 2030 and using the non-domestic rates regime to further our net zero ambitions by introducing a relief for qualifying EV charging points for 10 years. She has looked at transitioning to zero emissions heavy goods vehicles, which is an area in which there is already quite a lot of movement. Ms Hyslop said that we could be in a position to accelerate that by Government intervention and by drawing in more commercial finance. Further, £800,000 was put into the development of skills in heavy duty vehicle decarbonisation.

I think that I know what you are asking for. You are looking for detail on what additional policies were brought in as a result of the decision that we made on livestock.

You say “you”, but it is effectively—

No. I do not really get that logic. The production emissions that are associated with oil and gas are quite small compared with all the emissions that are associated with heat and transport. It is about the burning of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas emissions. Those are the things that need to be reduced in order for us to get to net zero.

No one is saying that it would be preferable to import anything, and that issue really does not have much of an impact on the climate change plan, in which the sectors that are associated with the highest emissions have been set out. Those sectors are where we are making interventions to reduce the emissions to get us to net zero.

10:45

That is not included in here—we are talking about the climate change plan.

You have just given a summary that I do not necessarily agree with. I have explained the reason for protecting Scotland against global economic shocks and the reason why production emissions do not feature particularly heavily in the climate change plan. It is an emissions reduction plan that is associated with the heaviest emissions figures in Scottish society, which largely lie in the areas of heat, land use and transport. As a devolved Government, we do not have responsibility for oil and gas licences, but we do have responsibility for emissions reductions in all the sectors that I mentioned, and the climate change plan sets out our ideas for how we might do that.

Certainly. Any production emissions that are associated with oil and gas are in the UK’s inventory as well. That is another reason why they are not factored into the climate change plan. It is Scotland’s climate change plan to reduce emissions, but I am happy to set out how countries are asked to account for their emissions.

First, Acorn was never predicated on one or two sites. The Scottish cluster involved looking into sectors—particularly hard-to-decarbonise sectors—throughout the whole of Scotland that might benefit from having CCUS. It was never predicated on the untimely closure of the places that you mentioned. Forgive me, but I am not going to talk about any potential plans. I cannot and will not do that.

Acorn is not only viable but absolutely necessary. If the UK Government does not provide substantial funding for it, we will miss out on a massive economic growth area for Scotland, as well as put in jeopardy the UK’s climate change ambitions more generally. It is one of the most mature of all the projects in the UK, and it has the scale that we need. I have already made that point, so I will not repeat it.

You mentioned that the Climate Change Committee recommended half of the figure that we have gone for, but it always said that we could go further—it did not say that its figure represented the limit of the negative emissions technology. We had those discussions with the CCC, and it said that we could go further.

I will explain how we arrived at our position. We take a bottom-up approach to NETS modelling. We have had a lot of input from industry round-table discussions and academic research, as well as information from companies that already capture COin Scotland about where they could scale up and what more they could do. The consensus was that a target of 3.3 megatonnes per annum by 2040 was stretching but achievable.

The CCC used NETS to balance residual emissions from other sectors and fill in the gaps, but we are actively looking at this as a real growth area for Scotland. Such is the capacity that we have that it would be less a case of taking residual emissions and more a case of providing a source of carbon capture not only for Scotland’s emissions and its hard-to-abate sectors, but for the whole of the UK and beyond.

We will set out our preferred route to NETS deployment later this year. Obviously, there will be the election. The UK Government has not published its policy on NETS deployment. At the moment, we are factoring into all our calculations the fact that we cannot count on any funding from the UK Government until we know what it sets out.

We will publish a route map for the deployment of negative emissions technologies at scale by 2040. That area of work is one in which we thought that we could go further.