In 2019, a partnership between BP and German vitality supplier ENBW agreed to pay £231 million ($290 million) in annual option fees alone.

While the offshore wind business booms, the Crown Estate is already eyeing the subsequent alternative to money in on its seabed empire: carbon storage. The seabed across the UK has room to retailer 78 billion tons of carbon dioxide—greater than sufficient area to cram in 200 years’ price of the nation’s annual emissions. Increasingly, the North Sea is being seen as a vacation spot to retailer carbon captured from hard-to-decarbonize industries, together with metal, cement, and fertilizer manufacturing.

“As the science on climate change has progressed, we’ve come to realize that just decarbonizing the power sector itself is not enough. We also need to reduce emissions and decarbonize other industries, other sources of emissions,” says Jonathan Pearce, carbon dioxide storage group chief on the British Geological Survey.

Although it’s nonetheless the center of the UK’s fossil gasoline business, the North Sea could come to play an necessary half within the nation’s decarbonization plans. In 2019 the Committee on Climate Change—a public physique that advises the federal government—concluded that carbon seize and storage is a “necessity, not an option” if the UK goes to attain its legally binding aim of reaching web zero greenhouse fuel emissions by 2050.

But carbon storage plans have had a rocky begin, says Esin Serin, a coverage analyst on the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment on the London School of Economics. In 2011 and 2015 the federal government canceled main carbon seize and storage initiatives, attracting criticism from those who say the UK has been gradual to capitalize on its pure storage belongings. That is beginning to change. The authorities’s pledge to hit web zero carbon emissions “was a turning point for carbon capture, usage, and storage,” says Serin.

The UK has set itself the goal of capturing as much as 30 million tons of carbon dioxide yearly by 2030, with the primary carbon seize clusters centering round industrial cities and cities within the northeast and northwest of England. “There’s now a real global competition for who’s going to reap the industrial and economic benefits from the world effort to try and get to net zero emissions,” Serin says.

All of meaning the Crown Estate is now sitting on one other precious asset deep beneath the ocean. The property is accountable for granting the rights for carbon storage beneath the seabed round England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, in addition to leases for pipelines that may switch carbon dioxide to those underground shops, most of that are positioned within the North Sea. Storage licenses are permitted by the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), a public physique that regulates the oil, fuel, and carbon storage industries within the North Sea.

So far, the NTSA has granted seven licenses for seabed carbon storage round England. One of these licenses—granted in 2013 to Shell—has expired, so there are actually six energetic carbon storage licenses, masking 5 websites within the North Sea and one within the Irish Sea to the west of England. In September 2022, the NSTA closed bidding on the primary public spherical of carbon storage licensing after receiving bids from 19 companies for the 13 carbon storage websites supplied up. But any firm that wishes to move and retailer carbon beneath the ocean will even must buy rights from the Crown Estate. So far just one venture holds an agreement for lease from the Crown Estate: a bit of the North Sea being explored by a partnership between BP, Carbon Sentinel, and Equinor New Energy for its carbon storage potential.