#ThinkAgainRachel about burning billions on Carbon Capture

UK CCS plans have up to £136bn for power stations to burn gas and £128bn to burn biomass

Dr Andrew Boswell and Simon Oldridge investigate the full costs of UK carbon capture over the next 25 years

Summary

The UK government has already pledged £22bn for new fossil fuel carbon capture projects in Teesside and around Merseyside.

Whitehall sources suggest the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves will announce even more public funding in the June 11th spending review—this time for new carbon capture plants in Humberside and NE Scotland.

And on June 2nd, a parliamentary committee passed legislation to facilitate the Government to extend subsidies for Drax power station’s science-denying tree-burning operations for decades to come - and opening the door to billions of public money being wasted on adding unproven carbon capture plant at Drax. Extraordinarily, key evidence was withheld from the MPs voting—see for example.

What is more .. this is just the start, with billions more of public funds set to prop up yesterday’s polluting industries over the next twenty-five years.

Every £ spent on carbon capture is one which could instead be invested in accelerating the rollout of cheap, clean renewables and energy storage —giving us more energy independence.

Main post continues below the video

Who are we and what can you do?

#ScrapCarbonCapture campaigns against carbon capture when it is based on fossil fuels or large-scale wood burning. Our campaign is jointly with MP Watch, Zero Hour and Campaign against Climate Change. Please watch and share our short campaign video below.

And please take a couple of minutes to write to your MP

Key points

To find out just how much more could be spent on gas and biomass burning over the next 25 years, we analysed recent advice given by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) to the government.

• The latest Climate Change Committee report projects that building and operating Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), with the associated continued reliance on fossil fuels, will demand public and private investment of £350bn - £408bn—despite the chair of the committee stating clearly on a recent podcast that CCS should not be used on gas plants generating electricity.

• £264bn of this figure is recommended for continuing to burn gas and biomass – industries which are already accelerating the climate crisis, and which will continue to do so even with CCS. Up to £136bn for building and operating power stations burning gas [see footnote A], and £128bn for burning biomass with CCS (BECCS).

• The Government often presents carbon capture as a way to mop up emissions from existing industry. But only £22bn is recommended for decarbonising hard-to-abate industry—just 5 to 6% of all CCS sectors. Let’s be clear: this is about extending the life of polluting industries after heavy lobbying (watch short film).

• Investment in renewables and storage is expected to generate 5.6 times more electricity in 2050 per £1 investment than gas with CCS or with hydrogen.

These astronomical figures come straight from data and advice given to the government by the Climate Change Committee (CCC) in February. This advice, called the Seventh Carbon Budget report, will shape the Government’s new climate plan for the next twenty-five years to 2050, due for publication this autumn.

Does carbon capture even work?

The main components of the Government’s carbon capture plans are the expansion of fossil-gas infrastructure and the burning of wood at Drax. Scientists are clear that both of these technologies will worsen climate change—even if the capture technology works properly (a big “if”). A forthcoming briefing from MP Watch will explain why low-carbon claims around biomass are false. The following graphic outlines why new gas power stations and blue hydrogen plants will be around as bad as coal for the climate.

How could the Government make such a big mistake?

The Government has been under extremely heavy lobbying from the fossil fuel industry to continue with these carbon capture plans, developed by the Conservative Government. Both the Government and the Climate Change Committee are rigidly following the UK’s outdated climate legislation which ignores any emissions that our activities here in the UK cause beyond our borders. So they can conveniently pretend these technologies are low-carbon.

Follow the money

The Government and the carbon capture lobby (largely owned by the fossil fuel industry) tell us that CCS is primarily about capturing industrial emissions. This is extremely misleading. Industrial CCS only plays a minor role, with a relatively small recommended spend of £22 billion [see footnote B]. Government plans are instead primarily about enabling the continued burning of gas and biomass, with a recommended spend of £264 billion—twelve times more than proposed for industrial capture.

In truth, the case for industrial CCS just isn’t that strong. Superior long-term options are rapidly developing, for example in steel production. It is generally better to electrify processes, rather than trying to patch over 20th Century technology with dubious and expensive CCS. That said, there may be a case for CCS in some industries where there isn’t yet a scalable alternative: for example, cement production.

The graphs below summarise how the money would be spent each year, across all CCS technologies [see footnote C], first by Capex (essentially construction) and then by Opex (operation).

The capital costs of gas with CCS, or gas co-fired with hydrogen, will be up to £4.5bn annually into the late 2040s indicating that gas fired electricity plants will still be under construction even then which will operate well into the second half of the century. Technically, co-firing gas with hydrogen could include burning green hydrogen for electricity, but leading analysts are clear that the economics will never stack up —leaving this category predominantly about fossil fuels. Gas with CCS, or gas co-fired with hydrogen, will have a very damaging effect on the climate— even if the CCS works. So the government is handing billions to fossil fuel companies to accelerate climate change for many decades. See our other recent blog for details.

Operating all the planned CCS technology will cost £18bn a year by 2050 with the operational costs for burning gas and biomass with CCS being around £10bn a year. This is an intolerable burden on our children—locking them into paying polluters to continue worsening climate change.

Who pays and is it good value?

These foolhardy plans will be largely funded from the public purse, partly from levies on consumer electricity bills. Since much of this technology is new and unproven, cost overruns are highly likely. And adding CCS to traditional polluting industries is an extremely expensive way to generate electricity [see footnote D]. The influential parliamentary Public Accounts Committee has already warned that these plans would raise household and industry energy bills.

Take Action now

This Government is set to waste over £250bn of public money on gas with CCS, gas co-fired with hydrogen, and biomass with CCS —each of which will actively worsen the climate crisis. For the same investment, renewables and storage could deliver over five times more clean electricity, without the hidden emissions that projects like Net Zero Teesside (a new gas with CCS plant) and Drax ignore. The Government and Climate Change Committee are turning a blind eye to many issues and pretending they don’t count: methane leaks, extraction pollution, offshored emissions for gas with CCS; biodiversity loss and global impacts to forest carbon stocks for bioenergy. But the truth is this: CCS with biomass and fossil fuels is a dangerous distraction, locking us into expensive, high-carbon infrastructure while renewables sit ready to replace it. This isn’t ‘net zero’—it’s a reckless subsidy for the dinosaur burning industries of the past, and the public is paying the price.

Instead of deluding ourselves into thinking that we can continue burning fossil fuels and biomass with fake solutions, we should build systems fit for the 21st century. Please write to your MP or arrange to meet with them at the link below.

Footnotes

[A] Either with CCS or with hydrogen produced predominantly with CCS before 2040

[B] The Climate Change Committee (CCC) recommends some hydrogen for decarbonising industrial processes, in addition to the direct carbon capture of industrial processes. However, the Bloomberg NEF report suggests Green Hydrogen prices will remain stubbornly high for decades (contrary to the Seventh Carbon Budget report at Table 7.7.1) so this hydrogen is likely to be Blue Hydrogen derived from gas and CCS processing. The CCC conflate blue and green hydrogen Capex and Opex data, so it is not possible to provide the costs for this blue hydrogen.

[C] The CCC projections are for six main sectors: “dispatchable low carbon energy” (gas with CCS), biomass with CCS (BECCS), Direct Air Capture (DACCS), “Low carbon hydrogen**” (green and blue hydrogen), EfW (waste incinerators with CCS), CCS for industry. As explained above, by the far the most costs are for gas and biomass with CCS.

** Note, we do not accept the CCC’s labelling of blue hydrogen as “low carbon hydrogen” as it has very high, and climate damaging, upstream emissions from Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), covered in our recent blog.

[D] The Climate Change Committee predicts that at 2050, the investment of £136bn into gas with CCS, and co-firing gas with hydrogen, will provide 5.5% of electricity generation whilst an investment of £360bn into renewables and energy storage will provide 81.8% of electricity [see CCC data]. This is not good value for money as investment in renewables and storage generates 5.6 times more electricity in 2050 per £1 investment into these gas technologies.

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