So whose interests do you think are best served by significant amounts of public money being prioritised to support Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)? We now have the definitive answer to that question, courtesy of Donald Trump’s campaign (through his Big, Beautiful Bill !) to lay waste to his predecessor’s Inflation Reduction Act – the principal purpose of which was to promote low-carbon technologies and create millions of jobs in the process.
Trump’s axe has fallen with deadly precision: tax credits for solar schemes – gone; for wind – both onshore and offshore – gone; funds to promote the sale of EVs – gone; investments in battery and other storage technologies – gone. The Big Beautiful Bill will cause wholesale devastation – much worse than environmentalists feared.
So what will be left of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act –where hasn’t the axe fallen? Three big survivors: first, all things nuclear. Predictably. Second, ethanol production – gotta keep those corn billionaires on board. Third – yes, you guessed it – CCAstonishingly, fossil fuel companies will go on being paid $60 for every tonne of CO2 captured from a plant’s flue gases, and then re-injected into clapped-out oil and gas wells to squeeze out anything that’s left – ‘Enhanced Oil Recovery’, as it’s known. By some calculations, were this direct bung to the fossil fuel lobby to continue, it will cost US taxpayers more than $800 billion over the next 15 years. There’s even more on offer for those who not only capture the CO2 but then store it away ‘permanently’ in spent oil and gas reservoirs.
So let’s call out subsidised CCS for what it still is, in the US, the UK or anywhere else: just one more abuse of taxpayers’ money to go on supporting the fossil fuel incumbency. (At which point I have to provide my standard caveat: CCS may well prove to have a significant role to play in helping to decarbonise ‘hard-to-abate ‘ sectors such as the production of concrete and other industrial processes. It may even have a role to play in the bioenergy sector, as I myself have argued. But that’s not what governments are prioritising).
Without continuing, very generous taxpayer support, there would be no viable CCS industry. And given that these subsidies have been going on for decades, one has to ask why the industry itself has failed so miserably to get on top of performance, reliability and cost issues.
These questions are regularly put to Ed Miliband, Secretary of State at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, who just happens to be a very big fan of CCS. But answers has he none – as has been so brilliantly revealed by the dedicated campaigning of Dr Andrew Boswell.
For the past couple of years, he’s been intent on demonstrating that the UK Government’s decision to support a massive new ‘CCS-enabled’ gas-fired power station on Teesside (being developed by BP and Equinor) was unlawful on the grounds that it did not fully take into account the emissions the plant would cause – not from the burning of the gas, but from extracting, processing and transporting it to the power station. A recent study by Cornell University shows that the carbon footprint of Liquefied Natural Gas is worse than that of coal, primarily because of these supply chain emissions.
On May 27th, the Court of Appeal dismissed his case – which has been steadfastly supported by Zero Hour, MP Watch and the Campaign Against Climate Change. Huge disappointment. But the campaign goes on. It’s really not to late to ensure that as little as possible of the £22 billion of our money that has been set aside for these CCS scams ever gets spent.
This is really all about the opportunity costs of splurging billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money primarily to support the continuing use of fossil fuels – and the almost deranged ‘magical thinking’ that lies behind it. The illusion we’re dealing with here is that it’s going to be possible to maintain our energy-intensive industrial economy, using technologies like CCS, while simultaneously striving to meet our climate goals. A chronic case of having your earthly cake and eating it.
The utter absurdity all of this can be seen in the EU’s strategy for CCS. The Commission’s Industrial Carbon Management Strategy is totally dependent on rolling out CCS at a massive scale: permanently storing 50 million tonnes of CO2 by 2030, 280 million tonnes by 2040, and 450 million tonnes by 2050! At a cost of anywhere between €70 to €200 per tonne stored. This will require a network of new CO2 pipelines stretching 19,000 kilometres across Europe, costing in excess of €500 billion according to the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
It’s madness! And the weird thing is that everyone knows it’s completely unachievable – even the industry itself! After decades of trying to get CCS to work properly, there are no more than 47 commercial projects worldwide, capturing a total of around 50 million tonnes, almost all of which is being used for Enhanced Oil Recovery. And although the industry endlessly claims that 95% of CO2 will be captured in any new CCS plants, the operating record reveals that the average runs at about 50% – and never exceeds 80%!
Which is why I shall be continuing to support Andrew Boswell and colleagues in their ongoing campaign here in the UK.
And you can really help here. The campaign is asking two things: first, that the Government commissions an independent review of CCS, and second, that it removes CCS from the upcoming Climate Plan. This is the campaign’s launch blog and email action to MPs; and here’s the link to the short film released to help educate MPs who just get swept along by Ed Miliband’s tiggerish enthusiasm.
(I gave a speech outside the Royal Courts of Justice on March 4th when Andrew was arguing his case before the Court of Appeal. You can find my speech here).
I don’t doubt Ed Miliband’s sincerity, but this is just bonkers. And the Climate Change Committee’s as projections for CCS through to 2050 show just how bonkers, with astronomical amounts of money being required before then.
Coming on top of the Spending Reviews nuclear announcements (another £14 billion for Sizewell C, several billion for Rolls Royce’s huge new ‘Small’ modular reactor, and a great big bung for further fusion fantasies) the opportunity costs (in terms of the abuse of our money) are staggering.
For which we will be getting not one electron of ‘clean and green power’ before 2035 at the earliest.
