Can we trust in carbon capture? Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg/ Getty Images
“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.
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.
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SubscribeFunny that it was 22bn pledged by 2TK to these projects-of-dubious-value That’s exactly how large the so-called ‘black hole’ in the government finances was.
“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…”
I thought this was an interesting comment. The entire climate change alarmist narrative is based on models. It only makes sense that nonsense solutions are based on models as well.
The models are mathematical descriptions of scenarios. What are scenarios? Acts of the human imagination in the form of if … then statements. They are unverifiable because they are projections decades into the future.
I was thinking about global warming the other day and the 1.4C rise in temperature since 1850. I wondered what was the change in temperature from 1700-1850 (i.e. the previous 150 years)? Luckily we have one dataset of contemporary measurements that goes back to 1700: the Central England Temperature data series. So I had a look and what would you know? There was a 1.2C rise in temps in the 150 years prior to the Industrial Revolution! So it would be more accurate to say that we have seen a 2.5C rise in temperatures since 1700. Problem is that this kind of ruins the “man made” argument.
…. which brings us to green hydrogen followed by electricity storage in huge batteries. Or the US plan, sadly more advanced, to fire rockets into the stratosphere to distribute billions of reflective particles to block off the sun’s rays from the earth and enforce rapid cooling. As JV says, all on computer models which are probably wrong.
A herd of White Elephants
The very concept of a U.K. Government led energy transition to Net Zero carbon by 2050 is a joke. As this excellent article clearly shows, the idea that CCS can play an economically viable role in this plan is just another part of the grand delusion. It is also a great example of how a fool and £ 22 billion can soon be parted. Sadly though it’s not the fool’s own money which is being wasted here – it’s ours.
If you are not in the “I dont care” camp as the previous comments seem to be there are only two options for reducing CO2: green growth or degrowth. Green growth doesnt necessarily mean net zero by 2050. CCS globally is pretty important for achieving this – look at China, India, Indonesia, Japan or the Middle East- they are all deeply into fossil fuels as part of their energy mix. The only way to have a little less CO2 in the future is CCS.The author seems to be in favour of degrowth and redistribution (if you google him) and is mixing up his leftish anticapitalism ideology with how to solve the climate problem. I am not convinced of his argument: too expensive and just feeding greedy corporations. Instead of black and white how about a more pragmatic way forward: Research of CCS in a measured way without net zero alarmism / then more will be achieved with less money.
Have any Carbon Capture and Storage prototypes been run successfully?
None, apart from forests.
Carbon capture is touted as part of a “solution” to a problem that isn’t worth fixing.
In reply to Norfolk Sceptic:
One could forgo industrial CCS in favor of forests, but; forests are too efficient, there are too many un-intended benefits, their very long proven record is just too boring and they leave little bits of beauty and happiness all over the place. We can’t have any of that!
But, if we actually decided to do the right thing, just let’s not forget to clear out the brush and deadfall once in a while.
Just to clarify things. I believe back in 1996 that we signed up to NetZero2050. Since then the government changed things to NetZero2030.
My local county council has another aim – NetZero 2028. This council just had its budget meeting for 2025/6 and projects a loss of £14 million. In that budget they propose to turn all council offices to NetZero by installing heat pumps. They plan to buy a fleet of electric refuse trucks, thereby scrapping the old trucks, and all council vans will have to be changed to electric. They propose a 10% rise in Council Tax.
Before the meeting to decide the budget, they sent out a questionnaire about saving money by reducing services. In that questionnaire we were asked if we wanted to offset some of the CT rise by having less frequent refuse collections. Strangely, they didn’t offer the alternative of not buying the electric refuse trucks.
Looks like one con begets another. When you put people into panic over climate models that never quite pan out and hysterical predictions that never come to pass, don’t act shocked when a counter-tactic emerges with its own models that may be equally dubious. This isn’t about “the planet” or some other noble claim; it’s about money, power, and control. Anyone serious about decarbonization would be pushing nuclear hard.
Matt M – whilst agreeing there’s a lot of groupthink in the science world I think you’re slightly misunderstanding the IPCC data. It is not about temperature rises in the atmospheric region of the biosphere, but total global temperature, which is hugely different. The single largest heat sink is the oceanic mass. Your data set is truly fascinating and can add to the overall data, but it is too limited in detail and scope to counter the vast data sets on much more relevant measures.
In reply to Martin Specht: The argument that CCS is required for middle income countries is not new. It was the primary justification when I wrote my assessment of the economics of CCS nearly 8 years ago. The problem then and still today is that no sane middle income country is going to spend huge amounts of money on retrofitting carbon capture to existing power plants. The author somewhat exaggerates the energy cost of carbon capture but even on more optimistic views of future costs it is hopelessly uneconomic.
In addition, the author rather misrepresents the involvement of oil companies in carbon capture. They have a direct interest because of the need to strip CO2 from oil & gas production and also the use of CO2 for enhanced oil recovery. In addition, without the involvement of such companies there is nowhere to store large quantities of CO2. This is not a technology being promoted by oil & gas companies to subvert decarbonisation but one that won’t go anywhere without their skills and assets. Promoters of CCS projects aren’t daft and know that.
None of this excuses the foolishness of the current UK government. Still, the lesson of the last decade is that little will happen and the repeated announcements will amount to nothing more than empty virtue-signalling, wasting a lot of time and effort but not much money. One other thing to worry about is the utter gullibility of newspapers, TV, etc which reproduce this nonsense without carrying out the most basic of reality checks.
I couldn’t help thinking of the Covid forecasts produced by Neil Ferguson’s flawed modelling and which were used to justify wasting billions of pounds on excessive measures.
The problem with CCS, and hydrogen power too, is that the process will need to include the mass storage and moving of cryogenic temperature liquids. Any cryogenic liquid at ambient temperatures will quickly boil off so they are super energy intensive to keep at that temperature, and somewhat dangerous. It just won’t happen at any realistic scale before the whole scam is uncovered or something better turns up.
Of course CCS is a scam. On the other hand, if cement works aren’t able to “carry on as before”, how will all those wind turbines be mounted?
Mental institutions seem far superior solutions.
CCS is just one element of the massive scam and money laundering grift that represents the “climate change” industry.
Is the Earth warming? Is that a bad thing? Is that caused exclusively by carbon dioxide produced by man? Will the solution forced on us work and is it the only solution?
You have to be certain each answer is yes to carry on down the path we’re on, and yet all of them are unproven, and debatable. And yet here we are, committing economic suicide for a nebulous cause.
At least some people are getting rich….
Re comments referring to data on temperatures in England over past centuries, the Met Office website commmenting on the Central England Temperature data set, says:
‘The UK has a variable climate so can exhibit natural variations from year-to-year and even decade-to-decade. Human-caused climate change is super-imposed on this natural variation which can therefore appear to enhance or suppress the warming trend over short periods (see chart above). Therefore, climate change is not expected to be a year-on-year increase in UK temperature, but when you look at the series as a whole it is clear that recent decades are warmer than any time in the past 360 years, and we expect further warming this century’.
For the chart and more see https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/cet-series.
So-called “green-washing” by companies is mostly just the result of those companies doing what the legislators demand of them.
Usually in order to be allowed to continue to produce the hydrocarbons that civilised modern life requires.
You can hardly blame them for then publicising their efforts.
Maybe the way that the climate change scam will come to an end is when our lefty friends realize that robber barons, malefactors of great wealth, economic royalists, greedy bankers, and tech lords are making trillions in profits at the expense of the oppressed peoples and climate activists.
Hello Tesla.