Yes, \u00a3264bn. More than a quarter of a trillion. This cost will be divided between the public and private sectors. Given the record of CCS programmes so far, we can expect the public to carry most of it.<\/p>\n
An investigation by the House of Commons public accounts committee found that roughly 25% of the public costs of CCS<\/a> will be borne directly by the government, while the remainder will come from extra levies on our energy bills. The government should explain to the electorate that it intends to slap up to \u00a3198bn on our bills. Then see how that lands.<\/p>\n Even this might not be the end of it. Buried in an arcane side document is a government commitment to pay a \u201cpremium\u201d<\/a> for the hydrogen produced by the CCS programme for 15 years. This commitment is uncosted, but could run to tens of billions more.<\/p>\n But surely CCS is essential for cutting carbon emissions? That\u2019s how the government has pitched it. On the contrary, this programme will massively increase them. The Climate Change Committee claims that the role of CCS is \u201climited to sectors where there are few, or no, alternatives<\/a>\u201d. But this is simply untrue. Its own data shows<\/a> that only between 5% and 6% of the CCS deployment in the UK will be used to address the emissions of industrial sectors such as chemicals and cement, whose impact is hard to abate (though even here there are partial alternatives<\/a>).<\/p>\n The great majority of CCS will be attached to new fossil fuel-burning power stations, wood-burning power stations and hydrogen production from fossil gas. In fact, almost all the projects in the government\u2019s first tranche are for fossil fuel-based schemes<\/a>. But there are abundant alternatives to these highly destructive plans. Given the speed at which battery technology is evolving<\/a>, enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply without any use of fossil fuels, the committee\u2019s claim is bunkum.<\/p>\n Its insistence that we need hydrogen made from fossil gas is also baseless. Its own figures<\/a> show that producing hydrogen from gas with CCS will cost twice as much by 2050 as producing it from the electrolysis of water, using renewable electricity.<\/p>\n The new CCS plants will mean massively more gas use than the UK would otherwise have required. Ultimately, that means more imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). We now know that, thanks to methane leakage along the production and transport chain, LNG has higher emissions than coal<\/a>. Two-thirds of its greenhouse impact occurs before the gas arrives in this country. So that\u2019s all right then \u2013 it doesn\u2019t count towards our national figures.<\/p>\n If the real aim were to cut emissions, we would push fossil fuel use in the electricity sector down to zero, and scale up renewables and battery storage instead. The net effect? Much lower climate impacts and much lower bills<\/a>. Instead, the programme will greatly ramp up both. Why?<\/p>\n Well, the whole thing has been built the wrong way round. It appears likely to be the result of massive lobbying<\/a> by fossil fuel companies. In 2023 alone, as the key decision on deployment loomed, the oil companies Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with Conservative ministers to discuss CCS. Why? Because they know it\u2019s the only way they will be permitted to keep burning gas. Governments have sought to find a way of meeting their demands while adhering to the climate budgets, so lo, a \u00a3264bn white elephant is born. As the Climate Change Committee admits<\/a>, \u201cgas with CCS accounts for around half of the remaining demand for fossil fuels in 2050\u201d in the UK. In other words, this is their lifeline.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n And now we know something else: that the scientific credibility of CCS as a climate solution was shaped by the oil company BP. Investigative work<\/a> by ProPublica and Drilled discovered that BP both financed and helped steer one of the most famous of all climate papers. The \u201cWedges\u201d paper<\/a>, published in 2004, became a foundation of government policy around the world. It purported to show how climate stabilisation was compatible with continued fossil use. And one of the major policies its plan relied on was carbon capture and storage.<\/p>\n BP\u2019s chief executive suggested the \u201cwedges\u201d concept. Another BP<\/a> executive was so heavily involved that the scientists suggested he should be named as co-author. He declined: the industry tries not to leave fingerprints. The paper greatly oversold CCS, presenting it as \u201calready deployed at an industrial scale\u201d. In reality, it had barely been tested. Yet it underpinned three of the 15 climate actions the paper proposed.<\/p>\n Since then, there has been a long record of shiny promises followed by partial or total failures<\/a>. In the UK alone, three attempts (the 2005 Peterhead plan<\/a>, a 2011 demonstration project<\/a> and a 2012 funding competition<\/a>) have been abandoned, thanks to cost escalation and infeasibility. As the public accounts committee remarks, the government \u201cis taking a high-risk approach by backing first-of-a-kind, unproven technologies with large amounts of taxpayer and consumer funding\u201d.<\/p>\n But success is not the point. The point is to provide a gigantic, publicly funded reason for the fossil fuel industry to stay in business. Guess who the lead operator of the government\u2019s first CCS cluster<\/a> is. Hello, BP<\/a>.<\/p>\n So we come round full circle. From cradle to grave, this programme appeases the world\u2019s most antisocial and destructive sector. The wasted money, the lost years, the lost lives: for how much longer will this farce continue? And how many more warnings will the government ignore?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new prime minister will be looking for money? Well, here\u2019s \u00a321.7bn lying on the ground. The government…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":531024,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[242,85,46,141],"class_list":["post-531023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=531023"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/531023\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/531024"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=531023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=531023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=531023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Matters_of_opinion_11.jpg\")
<\/p>\n