Can we trust in carbon capture? Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg/ Getty Images


January 17, 2025   5 mins

“A white elephant.” “A colossal waste of money.” “A risk of carbon lock-in.” When Keir Starmer pledged £22 billion last October to carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects over the next 25 years, scientists and environmentalist NGOs were wise to protest. The money, which will fund two major clusters in Merseyside and Teesside, will flow straight into the pockets of Equinor, Shell and Eni. This paradox of “green money” financing oil companies is nothing new: for decades now, fossil fuel interests hoping to slow climate action have been driving carbon capture technology.

The appeal lies in the fact that it promises to solve a rather serious problem in the current “energy transition” plan, which primarily concerns decarbonising electricity, which accounts for 40% of global emissions, and to a lesser extent heating and land transport. But when it comes to aviation, shipping, steel, cement, plastics, fertilisers, agriculture, construction and the arms industry, the prospects for decarbonisation remain remote, well beyond the 2050 Net Zero targets. Energy experts — and experts in euphemisms — sometimes describe these sectors as “hard to abate”. Faced with the predictable failure of decarbonising the economy through an “energy transition”, CCS technology has emerged as an alternative solution. It works by capturing CO2 billowing out of industrial chimneys, transporting it, and injecting it underground. Coupled with biomass electricity generation, it could theoretically pump emissions out of the atmosphere. This would mean that we could protect the climate while also using fossil fuels to produce electricity.

It all sounds miraculous, but the fact is CCS is just another polluting industry  — and on top of that, it is astoundingly inefficient and difficult to scale. The amount of electricity required in the process is such that one additional power station would have to be built for every two or three power stations just to capture the emissions. And this is only the first step: all the CO2 still needs to be liquified, shipped far away and stored underground. A recent study estimates the loss of efficiency for a thermal plant equipped with CCS at 58%.

And not only does it consume a vast amount of electricity, CCS also demands a mass of public money: $8 billion in the United States by 2026 (not counting tax deductions), $5 billion in Denmark, $3 billion in France, and $2 billion in Norway. Yet the prize for big spending still goes to the British government, which is chucking subsidies at companies that profit from the fossil fuel status quo. Thanks to CCS, whole sectors of industry — from cement works to blast furnaces and power stations — can carry on as before, while their spin doctors talk emptily about the climate emergency and Net Zero.

The proponents of CCS cite the “Net-Zero” scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), which each predict that billions of tonnes of CO2 will need to be captured and stored underground in the coming century. This might suggest a bright future for carbon capture technology. Unfortunately, the reality is more complex. When it comes to CCS, it is often difficult to distinguish between neutral expertise and industrial lobbying. And there are many who argue that research into the technology is compromised by financial links to fossil lobby groups.

Carbon capture technology first emerged in the Seventies, in the oil fields of Texas. It was primarily a natural gas purification technique; the CO2 recovered from that process could then be injected into oil wells to increase their pressure. At the end of the decade, when the issue of climate change surfaced in the political arena against the backdrop of a US coal boom, carbon capture began to appear as a possible “solution” to the problem.

At the time, the experts were extremely reserved. In 1979, the World Coal Report, which brought together hundreds of experts from all over the world, agreed that carbon capture at scale was impracticable. In 1985, at a conference of the Air Pollution Control Association, researchers from the Brookhaven laboratory estimated that equipping a coal-fired power station with CCS would increase the price per kWh by 70% to 150%. Initially, IPCC Group III — the panel of experts in charge of studying the solutions to global warming — followed this line of reasoning. Their first report in 1995 said very little about carbon capture, while their 2001 report devoted a section to the subject, but pointed out that nuclear power would be a far cheaper option. Yet more than a decade later, the IPCC had a change of heart, with its 2014 and 2022 reports granting a considerable role to carbon capture technology.

“There are many who argue that research into the technology is compromised by financial links to fossil lobby groups.”

Why the sudden U-turn? In the intervening years, climate experts started paying more attention to emerging research funded by the fossil fuel industry, which began pushing CCS as a solution. Governments liked it, in particular those of the USA, Canada and Norway. In February 1992, the first international conference on Carbon Dioxide Removal was held in Amsterdam, sponsored by the US Department of Energy. In its wake, the oil majors (Exxon, Total, Statoil, BP, Chevron, Shell) joined forces with the International Energy Agency to create the IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme, a think tank tasked with studying and promoting CCS techniques. This led to the establishment of a biennial conference: the Green House Gas Control Technology (GHGT). These conferences, still held today, are attended by several hundred people and financed by the major oil, electricity, steel and cement producers.

By the turn of the millennium, the idea of carbon capture had entered the mainstream. In the early 2000s, George W. Bush’s presidency began pushing CCS, creating a “Carbon Sequestration Leadership Forum”, to which the G8 and the European Union signed up. At COP 7 in Marrakech in 2001, the IPCC was asked to study it as an option. The resulting 2005 special report marked a turning point for the technology: no longer was the IPCC sceptical about its scalability. This time the additional cost of power generation with CCS was presented as relatively low — from 1-5 cents per kilowatt-hour — and the natural reservoirs available for storing CO2 as gigantic, of the order of 2,000 gigatonnes.

Yet this glowing report was built on research financed by the fossil fuel industry. Many of its references were taken from GHGT conferences, which were set up to push this technology. Even worse, a number of the IPCC experts on carbon capture were directly employed by oil companies. However, the doubtful pedigree of this expertise was quickly forgotten thanks to the miracle of the peer review process. In 2007, when a new peer-reviewed journal called International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control was founded, the editors argued that the 2005 report had been a watershed moment in the acceptance of CCS as a serious mitigation option. The following years saw a considerable expansion in the scientific literature on the subject.

In the space of 30 years, in the scientific literature, CCS has gone from being a false promise to a “green technology”. Yet over the same period of time, its history has been one of failure, cost overruns and broken promises. The technology has already swallowed up considerable sums of public money in R&D — including $5.3 billion provided by the US Department of Energy between 2011 and 2020 — with very disappointing results. Worldwide, only two coal-fired power stations capture part of their CO2 emissions, and there is currently not a single blast furnace or cement plant that has successfully implemented the technology.

The discrepancy between the IPCC’s great expectations for CCS and the reality casts doubts upon the nature of expertise. And it reveals the danger of leaving expertise on climate change “solutions” in the hands of modellers, who often fail to take concrete technological difficulties into account. Their models must be taken for what they are — thought experiments on computers — and governments must not hide behind their curves to shower the fossil fuel industries with “green” subsidies. After all, it is hardly democratic to gamble public money on speculative green technology. Perhaps Keir Starmer’s £22 billion would have been better spent elsewhere.


Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology, previously at Imperial College London, now based in Paris at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. His latest book is More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Allen Lane).