Critiques Mount Against UK Carbon Capture and Storage Plans

Prof Myles Allen and colleagues, in their letter (12 July) on carbon capture and storage (CCS), propose licensing gasfields on condition that producers store an increasing proportion of “the carbon dioxide their products generate”. Their proposal only considers CO2. Methane is excluded by choice although it leaks throughout global fossil-fuel supply chains, including during extraction, processing, liquefaction and shipping.

A growing academic literature, supported by satellite observations of major methane plumes, shows that these emissions can be very substantial, and are the dominant near-term climate impact for gas supplied as liquefied natural gas.

The UN secretary general targeted these near-term climate impacts at London Climate Week, with his call to action on methane. Policymakers should treat this proposal with extreme caution as it does not deal with those impacts.

The estimated £264bn cost of CCS to the UK by 2050 is derived from the Climate Change Committee’s own data and cannot simply be dismissed. The government’s £21.7bn funding commitment has so far supported projects under construction that would capture just over 3m tonnes of CO2 a year. By contrast, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association’s own project pipeline envisages around 77m tonnes – around 25 times as much – suggesting that when funding to deliver that pipeline is considered, the £264bn figure may be conservative.

On value for money, the International Energy Agency reports that solar and wind avoided 2,600 megatonnes of CO2 in 2025. Global CCS captures under 40 megatonnes – a 65-fold difference, and one that will only widen as renewables and energy storage grow far faster. Moving rapidly to 100% renewables is the most cost-effective way to avoid emissions in the energy system.

As with much infrastructure, CCS job figures flatter to deceive. Construction employment comes first, then vanishes, leaving a far smaller operational workforce – but the public subsidy runs on for 25 years. Per lasting job, the cost to the taxpayer is extraordinary.

This evidence is exactly what this debate needs.

Andrew Boswell

Carbon Reckoning

Olivia Powis, the CEO of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA), a trade association whose membership includes many of the oil and gas companies and contractors that stand to gain from billions of pounds in taxpayer support, again portrays the UK’s CCS plans as being mainly about capturing emissions from industry (Letters, 12 July). That characterisation is misleading.

As George Monbiot wrote in the article to which she is responding, only about 5% of the projected cost of the UK’s CCS programme relates to hard-to-abate industry. The overwhelming majority is for new gas power stations, fossil gas hydrogen and bioenergy. Crucially, the CCSA is generally not proposing to retrofit existing gas power stations, but to build new ones – with public money.

That makes the source of the extra gas crucial. The UK already imports a quarter of the gas it burns as liquefied natural gas (LNG), mostly from US fracking operations. Those imports involve substantial methane emissions along a vast international supply chain. Whether or not the Jackdaw gasfield proceeds, imported LNG will remain the UK’s marginal source of gas. Every new gas power station increases demand for imported LNG, locking in major upstream emissions that CCS will not capture.

Prof Myles Allen’s longstanding proposal that fossil fuel companies should pay to dispose of their carbon is a good one. But it does not answer Monbiot’s central criticism that CCS is a fig leaf for fossil fuel expansion.

Powis presents continued fossil fuel investment as the only option. It isn’t. While vested interests insist that Britain must remain dangerously dependent on fossil gas, experts in the field now agree that a 100% renewable energy system is technically feasible. Meanwhile, as we phase out fossil fuels, restoring nature offers a proven and cost-effective way to remove residual carbon while delivering benefits for wildlife, flood protection and public health.

Simon Oldridge

Co-founder, National Emergency Briefing