The great carbon capture con: behold the wasted billions Burnham could claw back | George Monbiot
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- UK CCS programme total projected cost is £264bn through 2050, not the £21.7bn cited in government press releases, according to Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge's analysis of Climate Change Committee data scattered across spreadsheets.
- House of Commons public accounts committee found roughly 25% of public CCS costs fall directly on government, with up to £198bn more potentially loaded onto consumer energy bills via levies.
- Climate Change Committee data shows only 5-6% of CCS deployment targets hard-to-abate sectors like cement and chemicals; the majority backs new fossil fuel power stations, wood-burning plants, and gas-based hydrogen production.
- Equinor, BP and ExxonMobil held 24 meetings with Conservative ministers in 2023 to discuss CCS as the key deployment decision approached.
- BP financed and helped steer the 2004 "Wedges" climate paper, which promoted CCS as "already deployed at an industrial scale" when it had barely been tested; BP is also lead operator of the government's first CCS cluster.
- Three UK CCS projects — the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project, and a 2012 funding competition — were abandoned over cost escalation and infeasibility.
Why it matters: The £264bn programme effectively functions as a public subsidy for fossil fuel companies — BP leads the first cluster — while potentially adding £198bn to consumer energy bills. The Climate Change Committee's own data shows renewables plus battery storage would cut emissions more cheaply than this CCS-heavy path, which the committee claims is "limited to sectors where there are few, or no, alternatives."
