This Is The UK"s Climate Plan? $25 Billion For "Carbon Capture", W. Goodies Built In For The Oil & Gas Sector?

[hatrack]

This will be Keir Starmer’s HS2: a hugely expensive scheme that will either be abandoned, scaled back or require massive extra funding to continue, after many billions have been spent. The government’s plan for carbon capture and storage (CCS) – catching carbon dioxide from major industry and pumping it into rocks under the North Sea – is a fossil fuel-driven boondoggle that will accelerate climate breakdown. Its ticket price of £21.7bn is just the beginning of a phenomenal fiscal nightmare.

There might be a case for a CCS programme if the following conditions were met. First, that the money for cheaper and more effective projects had already been committed. The opposite has happened. Labour slashed its green prosperity plan from £28bn a year to £15bn, and with it a sensible and rational programme for insulating 19m homes. The government boasts that its CCS scheme will be “the equivalent of taking around 4m cars off the road”. But at far lower cost, through a rational transport policy, it could remove millions of real cars from the roads, while improving our mobility, cutting air pollution and releasing land for green spaces and housing.

EDIT

That £21.7bn is the budget for construction only. To judge by decades of expensive CCS failures, it’s likely to be highly optimistic. The UK’s three previous attempts at CCS (the 2005 Peterhead plan, the 2011 demonstration project and the 2012 funding competition) were all cancelled as a result of cost escalation. An analysis by Oxford University’s Smith School shows that a heavy reliance on CCS massively increases the costs of cutting emissions. By contrast to other technologies such as solar, wind and batteries, its costs have not fallen at all in 40 years. When I asked the government what guarantee it could provide that construction costs would be capped at £21.7bn, it gave me a woolly answer about “value for money”, but no such reassurance. And this is just the start of it. Buried in an obscure ancillary document is a government commitment to pay a “premium” for the hydrogen component of the CCS programme for 15 years. How much will the total cost of this be? Again, no clear answer. Cutting cost-effective measures in favour of an open-ended, staggeringly expensive programme is the very definition of fiscal irresponsibility.

The second condition is that CCS will accelerate or complete the UK’s decarbonisation. But there’s a reason why oil and gas companies have lobbied so forcefully for this policy: it licenses continued fossil fuel production. The government’s CCS decision has been sold to us as a way to deliver blue hydrogen. This means hydrogen made from fossil gas, as opposed to green hydrogen, which is made by electrolysis with renewable electricity. An analysis by the climate experts Carbon Tracker shows that the additional gas demand caused by the UK’s CCS blue hydrogen programme will greatly increase overall emissions. It would exhaust the UK’s domestic gas supply, which would then necessitate importing liquefied gas (LNG) from the US and other sources. The government knows this, which is why it intends to approve the construction of an LNG terminal at Teesside.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/11/labour-carbon-capture-climate-breakdown

[Think. Again.]

1. Carbon Capture could help to remove existing CO2...

....that is left in the atmosphere AFTER WE STOP PUTTING IT THERE, but our only focus right now must be to stop putting it there in the first place.

[Beartracks]

2. YES!

If we stop putting CO2 in the atmosphere FIRST, then the task of removing all of it later, when that technology is eventually perfected at scale, will be so much less burdensome. That's not to say it won't still be costly, but it will be FAR LESS COSTLY -- and an avoided cost is a positive.

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