At issue: The legality of the grant of development consent for a new dual carriageway, including a new tunnel, crossing the Stonehenge World Heritage Site
At issue: The Drax power station is a large biomass power station in Drax, North Yorkshire, England. In January 2024 the Secretary of State granted development consent to install carbon capture technology at the plant. That decision has been challenged on public law grounds. The claimant is Biofuelwatch UK, which campaigns against the burning of biofuels. It argues the decision was unlawful as the likely harmful environmental effects were not assessed or taken into account, in breach of the relevant environmental impact assessment (EIA) regulations. Specifically it is said the regulations were breached:
• By zero-rating the carbon (CO2) emissions from biomass burning, i.e. treating it as producing no greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, despite the obvious and indisputable fact that the combustion of biomass releases huge quantities of GHG emissions
• By excluding the CO2 emissions from the units to be fitted with the carbon capture technology
• By treating the works to construct and operate transport and storage facilities for captured carbon as a separate project. Biofuelwatch says the Humber Low Carbon Pipelines Project to transfer the CO2 and store it in rock formations under the North Sea is essential for the Carbon Capture Usage and Storage (CCUS) to operate as a whole and should have been treated as the same project for EIA purposes.
The impact of these errors on the decision is said to be significant, on the basis they allowed the energy secretary to treat the project as resulting in a net reduction in emissions of 7,975,620 tCO2e per annum.
The next step is for the High Court to decide whether to give permission for the claim to proceed to a full hearing.
At issue: Whether and to what extent aviation emissions should play a role in deciding whether planning permission should be granted for the expansion of an airport.
At issue: The lawfulness of a further licensing round for North Sea oil and gas, and of related policy, including in respect of whether end use emissions are direct effects for the purposes of strategic environmental assessment.
At issue: Whether the financial disclosures required for an oil and gas company to list on the London Stock Exchange were lawful, despite not detailing certain climate-related risks.
At issue: Whether planning inspectors acted unlawfully when finding a council’s inclusion of net-zero standards in its plan for the development of a new village conflicted with national policy.