Your editorial (2 March) raises strong fiscal reasons why the Treasury should scrap its £22bn carbon capture and storage plan. The long-term cost is far more, with £59.7bn already allocated in operational subsidies.
However, it is also about the technology. The public accounts committee recently warned of “a high risk that CCUS [carbon capture, utilisation and storage] will not deliver to the timescales or the level of carbon reductions needed”, jeopardising UK carbon targets. MPs also criticised the government’s overreliance on CCUS, neglecting alternatives like renewable energy, saying it risks keeping energy bills high and tied to the volatile gas market, while offering no guarantee of meaningful progress toward net zero.
A major flaw in CCUS, especially for gas-fired plants and blue hydrogen, is its failure to address upstream emissions, including methane leakage, which forms the bulk of a plant’s carbon footprint. Methane accelerates climate breakdown faster than CO2. The Climate Change Committee’s recent seventh carbon budget report ignored this issue, as its methodology only accounts for UK carbon budgets, excluding emissions from global gas supply chains, such as liquefied natural gas from Texas or Qatar.
This week, I have been challenging the government at the appeal court over CCUS’s climate risks, because its use in gas plants results in significantly more CO2 and methane leaking into the atmosphere than is captured.
Dr Andrew Boswell
Norwich
• Any short-term savings from green cuts will be dwarfed by the costs of delaying the push for net zero. However, cutting carbon capture use and storage would not be a bad thing – if the money were moved from this expensive technology, which does not yet work at any meaningful scale, to cheaper things that do work: renewables and storage, insulation, and public information campaigns.
CCUS is being used by fossil fuel interests to suggest that continued extraction is acceptable, but the truth is that none of the six operational CCUS projects worldwide has met its targets, and some have failed altogether despite billions in public investment.
Even if they all met their targets, the total carbon removal would be a tiny percentage of current global emissions. It would be far more effective to focus short-term efforts on known technologies for emissions reduction.
David Stokes
Hertford
• It is a mistake to advocate for investment in carbon capture and storage as a key part of the drive towards net zero. The energy inventory of this technology shows it to be a poor investment for the foreseeable future as it requires a heavy electrical input for a modest return in CO2 removal. The one country where a viable scheme is running is Iceland, as it has unlimited geothermal energy resources.
A much better return on investment would be the extension of the electrical grid, particularly north-south close to our western seaboard. Marine tidal energy generation is now a mature technology, held in check by the absence of grid connections.
In the UK we have globally unrivalled energy generation potential around our coasts. The lunar gravitational pull is a totally predictable and reliable energy source, which would provide for the base load. This would remove all justification for further investment in nuclear power, which – contrary to Keir Starmer’s assertions – would not make us energy-independent, as the UK has no uranium mines.
Kate Macintosh
Winchester, Hampshire
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