October 4, 2024

expert reaction to govt pledge of £21.7bn for carbon capture projects

Scientists comment on a government pledge of £21.7bn for carbon capture projects. 

Prof Myles Allen FRS, Professor of Geosystem Sciences, University of Oxford, said:

“The world is going to generate more carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels than we can afford to dump into the atmosphere. It is utterly unrealistic to pretend otherwise. So, we need to scale up a massive global carbon dioxide disposal industry to have any hope of meeting our climate goals.

“As the country that started fossil fuels causing global warming, it is high time we played our part in scaling up this carbon dioxide disposal industry, so it’s great to see our government accepting this responsibility. All that said, we do need to talk about how this is all going to be paid for in the long term, because it doesn’t make sense for private companies to make massive profits selling fossil fuels while taxpayers pay to clean up the mess.”

Prof Geoffrey Maitland FREng, Professor of Energy Engineering, Imperial College London, said:

“The confirmation of £22bn of government funding for CCS announced today is excellent news for the UK economy, industry, jobs and ability to achieve our 2050 net-zero emissions commitment. 

“Decarbonising the electricity grid through replacing fossil fuel generation by renewables (principally onshore and offshore wind and solar) is not one of the biggest challenges to meeting the net-zero target – we are already well on the way to doing this.  The hard stuff is decarbonising the major industries which generate CO2 as a by-product such as cement manufacture, key to the construction industry, and steel and chemicals production where, even if they can in time be powered by electricity rather than fossil fuels, there will not be enough spare renewable electricity to do this for decades.  The same is true for hydrogen, where CCS-enabled production of blue hydrogen from natural gas, capturing and storing the CO2 by-product, will enable decarbonised hydrogen to be used as a clean, non-polluting fuel decades before we have enough spare renewable electricity to produce it in sufficient volumes by electrolysing water. So to continue to benefit from a modern built environment and the materials that make up the objects that surround us in our everyday lives that we take for granted, in our homes, offices, cars and the clothes we wear, but in a decarbonised way, CCS is essential to achieve this by 2050 in a way that is just for everyone in our society.

“Building CCS at scale as part of integrated low-carbon industrial clusters which are central to the government’s plan, initially the East Coast Cluster in the north-east and the HyNet Cluster in the north-west, and later hopefully in Scotland and Humberside, will bring the cost down to levels which are within the noise of normal energy price fluctuations and guarantee jobs and re-skilling in economically deprived areas of the country where much of these difficult to decarbonise industries reside.  On top of this, the CCS industry – which will grow – will eventually provide tens of thousands of jobs as well as preserving those in the industries it is enabling to decarbonise.  Also the UK’s depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the North Sea have enough capacity to enable countries without subsea storage facilities to safely store their captured CO2 and bring additional revenues to the UK.  CCS has had several false starts in the UK since the 1990s, so the backing of the Treasury and DESNZ to invest in this key technology is a milestone for a UK decarbonised future. 

“Today’s announcement is a win-win situation for the UK achieving its 2050 net-zero commitment in a way that will be of major benefit to the country’s economy and the well-being of its citizens.”

Prof Peter Styring, Professor of Chemical Engineering & Chemistry at the University of Sheffield, said:

“The announcement by Ed Miliband to commit £22bn to CCS fails to address the ‘U’ in CCUS – that’s utilisation, which looks to use the captured carbon dioxide to make value added products rather than landfill storage under the North Sea. Storage will always be a financial burden to emitters while Utilisation will be an income generator to at least partially offset the costs of CCS.

“Today’s announcement appears to focus on two pipelines being constructed in a major infrastructure project that will take several years to achieve. The plan is to capture £20 Mt CO2 per year, however the CO2 emissions from just the power sector are already well over 300 Mt per year. The main driver for the proposed funding is to open up the UK to accept waste CO2 from other countries for storage. While this does offer the potential for job creation and financial and economic value for the UK, it falls far short of addressing the emissions problem. Additionally the capture seems to be reliant on existing technologies that have not been proven despite over 15 years of investment by successive governments: new next generation capture technologies are needed to provide a step change approach.

“Technologies that are cheaper, more energy efficient, have greater CO2 capture efficiencies, that take up less space and that can be rapidly deployed in the field without long construction times and cost. There is a future for CCUS but at the moment we seem to be taking the wrong path to potential success.”

Dr Steve Smith, Associate Professor in Greenhouse Gas Removal and Executive Director of CO2RE Hub and Oxford Net Zero, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford, said:

“This is excellent news. CCS is one of the crucial parts in the whole jigsaw that makes up a clean, green UK for the future. It’s not an alternative to better home insulation, renewables, electric cars and the like; it’s an additional requirement if we are serious about the climate.

“Only one of the eight CCS projects being funded in this investment is a gas power station. The rest will capture carbon from a wide variety of industrial processes such as cement, energy from waste, and hydrogen production. This shows that CCS isn’t – and shouldn’t – just be a narrow get-out for fossil fuels. It’s building the infrastructure and jobs to support industries and other carbon removal technologies that will be vital for decades to come.”

Dr Mike Stephenson, Director of Stephenson Geoscience Consulting Ltd, said:

“The UK Government’s pledge of £21.7bn for carbon capture projects is an affirmation of Britain’s lead in CCS and the seriousness with which it takes the problem of climate change, but also of the need to maintain an industrial base. The government also recognises the importance of selling the technology to communities in terms of the jobs it will encourage, the financial value of the service it might provide for other European emitters, and the chance to export some of Britain’s expertise in CCS.

“However, the progress of CCS across the world overall is much slower in many emerging economies with large resources of fossil fuels, relatively new coal power plants with long lives ahead of them, and scenarios that suggest rapid energy demand growth and industrialisation. If these economies industrialise without emissions control of one kind or another we may end up with continued rises in emissions anyway. The nightmare scenario is enormous sums of money spent on the CCS ambitions of slow-growing, already-decarbonising, developed economies, but high atmospheric CO2. Wouldn’t it be better if some of this large sum of money could be spent on encouraging and facilitating industrial emissions reduction in areas will that really need it?”

Prof Martin Blunt FREng FRS, Professor of Flow in Porous Media at Imperial College London, said:

“It is excellent news that the Government is finally committing to large-scale carbon capture and storage in the UK.  This is a vital technology, already well-established at hundreds of sites around the world, that makes a vital contribution to decarbonising industry.  By 2030 there is every expectation that the UK will be a leader in this technology and, in combination with increased renewable electricity, on a viable pathway to net zero by 2050.”

Prof Jon Gibbins, Professor of Power Plant Engineering and Carbon Capture at the University of Sheffield, and Director of the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Community (UKCCSRC), said:

“The Government has announced strategic investments that will support the key enablers for future CCS cost reduction: shared CO2 transport and storage systems and the initial capture projects that are essential for ‘learning by doing’.  The UK CCS Research Community Network is already active in ensuring that the country gets the best possible value for money out of this large amount of public support by applying the knowledge gained as quickly and effectively as possible in the many follow-on projects that are being developed, so that CCS can show the same virtuous cycle of deployment and cost reduction as offshore wind has done.”

Prof Stuart Haszeldine, Professor of Carbon Capture and Storage at the University of Edinburgh, said:   

“This is fourth time lucky for CCS in the UK. After 3 false starts on projects with single sources to capture CO2, a change of philosophy has produced multiple industrial CO2 capture projects, mutually supporting pipelines feeding into secure geological stores. This ambitious and complex pathway is starting to convert the world’s first nation to industrialise coal use into the world’s first nation to decarbonise industry.

“The UK’s long CCS design journey started in 2005 with an unexpected offer from BP – not accepted by Government, leading to a competition to retrofit coal power electricity not awarded in 2011, then last minute cancellation in 2016 of funding for gas powered capture, and from 2018 a pivot to industrial projects mutually supporting shared pipelines and stores.

“CCS has operated successfully and safely in the Norwegian North Sea since 2006. But the debate between Perfect or Pragmatic on CCS still exercises those commentators and campaigners who prefer to completely escape from fossil fuels. However, hundreds of CO2 injections into geological storage worldwide have been competed with no leakage. But providing energy from adequate supplies of renewable electricity, and electrolysis to make green hydrogen, will not be installed for several decades. CCS provides achievable steps to rapidly decrease emissions at industrial scale, starting a transition into a lower carbon future. This is a revolutionary leap in energy systems.

“Perception of price remains the biggest blockage to routine installation of CCS. But the cost of government subsidy for the first projects will be spread between across the national energy system – equivalent to a fraction of penny each kilowatt hour.  At full decarbonisation, CCS will cost around 15 pence per litre of petrol – much less than annual market price variations, and affordable.

“Anticipating successful CCS operating projects, the UK government now needs to plan future CCS projects to operate without government grant support. Existing policies are mis-directed to pay for permissions to emit. What is needed for the future is a payment reward for storage of CO2. That can be achieved by an extended obligation on oil company suppliers of fossil carbon to capture and store CO2 emissions arising from their products. That principle was legally established for development of new oilfields in the UK Supreme Court ‘Finch’ case in June 2024.”

Declared interests

Stuart Haszeldine is not funded by hydrocarbon companies or CCS developers supported by government

Martin Blunt: “I receive funding from the oil industry to work on topics related to the energy transition.”

Jon Gibbins: “No direct interests in any of the CCS projects that will be supported (or any others).  As a professor working in the field of CCS and director of the UKCCSRC it is likely that UK CCS deployment generally will lead to extra opportunities for me related to research work and advice.”

Mike Stephenson: “I’m doing CCS consultancy and training globally through my one-man consultancy company . I’m paid to do this.”

Peter Styring receives Innovate UK and UKRI funding. He is Co-founder and Director of a university spin out company that does carbon capture, CCU International, and has worked with UK governments on CCUS.

Geoffrey Maitland: “My research on CCS used to be sponsored by Shell (2006-2018) but I no longer receive research funding from the oil and gas industry.”

Steve Smith: “I’m funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/V013106/1, the Greenhouse Gas Removal Demonstrators Programme), the University of Oxford (for Oxford Net Zero), the Natural Environment Research Council (grant NE/W004976/1, the AGILE Programme), the European Climate Foundation (for the Net Zero Tracker project), and I am on the Expert Advisory Board for Carbon Gap (not paid).”

Myles Allen: “none to declare.”

No others received.