The great carbon capture con: behold the wasted billions Burnham could claw back | George Monbiot
SkimNews Take
A twelve-fold gap between official CCS costs and independent estimates, paired with a technology that locks in fossil fuel use, points to the programme functioning as an undeclared public subsidy prolonging the fossil economy rather than transitioning away from it.
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- UK CCS programme is projected to cost £264bn between now and 2050, twelve times the £21.7bn figure in government press releases, according to Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge working through Climate Change Committee spreadsheets
- House of Commons public accounts committee found roughly 25% of public CCS costs will be borne directly by government, with the remainder added as levies on energy bills—up to £198bn in consumer charges
- Climate Change Committee claims CCS is reserved for sectors with 'few or no alternatives,' yet its own data shows only 5-6% of UK CCS deployment targets hard-to-abate industries like chemicals and cement
- BP financed and helped steer the influential 2004 'Wedges' climate paper, which greatly oversold CCS as 'already deployed at industrial scale' when it had barely been tested, an investigation by ProPublica and Drilled found
- BP is the lead operator of the government's first CCS cluster, while Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with Conservative ministers in 2023 to discuss CCS deployment
- Three UK CCS projects—the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project and a 2012 funding competition—have already been abandoned due to cost escalation and infeasibility
Why it matters: Up to £198bn could land on UK energy bills to fund a programme whose own data shows 94-95% of deployment will prop up fossil fuel gas, wood-burning power and hydrogen from gas—not hard-to-abate industry—contradicting the government's stated climate rationale and effectively subsidising the fossil fuel sector's continued operation.
