Kingsnorth Power Station will shut in 2015 after its owners abandoned a project to build a carbon capture and storage (CCS) scheme.

E.ON announced today it would not proceed to the next stage of the government's CCS competition.

The decision means the current Kingsnorth plant will shut in 2015, as per the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive.

E.ON blames the economic climate, and the decision last year to postpone building a new coal-fired power station, for announcing it will not go further in the competition.

Chief executive of E.ON UK Dr Paul Golby said: "Having postponed Kingsnorth last year, it has become clear that the economic conditions are still not right for us to progress the project and so, simply put, we have no power station on which to build a CCS demonstration.

“We therefore took the decision to withdraw from the government’s competition because we cannot proceed within the competition timescales.

“As a group we still believe that carbon capture and storage is a vital technology in the fight against climate change and will now be concentrating our efforts on our Maasvlakte project in the Netherlands as we believe the lessons from that project can be brought back to the UK for future generation CCS projects."

Carbon capture and storage captures carbon dioxide emitted from large combustion plants, like coal-fired power stations, and permanently stores it in geological structures underground.