A mere 17 years after the UK government first said it was indeed going to support Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), another bold (but vague) announcement has arrived. This one accompanied with a telephone number vague promise (£22 bn of taxpayer money spread over an alleged 25 years).
The announcement, trailed in the Financial Times yesterday is now accompanied by a Guardian op-ed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Reeves’ article – titled “Today, with our £22bn pledge for carbon capture, Labour’s green revolution for Britain begins “ – reads as if it were drafted by a ChatGPT knock-off trained entirely on industry press releases (“gamechanging technology” “4000 jobs“) and then ‘improved’ with the liberal and random sprinkling of sub-Blairite phonemes (“That’s what drives this government to do things differently. That’s the change we are offering. And that is the change we are determined to deliver.”)
Perhaps the general lesson is the extraordinary power of the fossil fuel lobby, able to get a chancellor who has taken body blows already for having a “treasury brain” and an aversion to any promises of public spending to come out so openly for a huge expenditure with such weak public support.
I literally wrote the book (“Carbon Capture and Storage in the United Kingdom History, Policies and Politics“) about the history of UK CCS policy. Well, a book – the first book), and I am both unsurprised and underwhelmed by the announcement.
It’s not clear that it is much more than a confirmation of a similar announcement from the Tories, with confirmation that projects everyone knew were “winning” in the third competition for taxpayer support. As the ever-astute FT writers point out
“the three industrial sites receiving support to attach carbon capture technology to their projects fall short of the eight which entered negotiations with the government last year. The prospects of support are now unclear for the remainder.”
Before explaining some of the history and talking about what we can reasonably expect to happen next, I’d like to offer two ways of thinking about CCS.
First, take the famous thought-experiment of the physicist Schrodinger, in which a cat in a box can be thought of as both dead and alive simultaneously. CCS is, when its proponents want it to be, a mature, proven technology that just needs “policy certainty” (which mostly seems to be code for whopping great Research, Development and Deployment grants and subsidies and generous under-written-by-the-taxpayer ‘market’ mechanisms). At other times, when research money is being dispensed or decades of delay, under-delivery or downright failure need to be explained away, CCS is a nascent technology, deserving of additional patience and faith. Always dead and alive simultaneously.
Second, if the cat is too cliched, turn your attention to one of the only great Hollywood sequels, Terminator 2: Judgment Day. You will recall it is about a world under the threat of a man-made environmental catastrophe, but for the most part oblivious. CCS can be thought of as the liquid metal assassin. It’s able to shape shift at will (CCS has been a technology that would save the coal industry, then one that would reduce industrial emissions, then one that would enable the production of so-called ‘blue hydrogen’ and is now even part of sucking random air out of the atmosphere (Direct Air Capture). Like the liquid metal nemesis, it is also incredibly hard to kill. No matter how many failures it endures, there it is, impassive, gleaming, ready for another bout.
Meanwhile, the timing is exquisite. In a couple of weeks there is, as Reeves’ article notes, Britain’s first international investment summit. It would not be a good look for the CCS decision to still be pending. Meanwhile the announcement comes a day after a detailed expose of the Australian situation by journalist Royce Kurmelovs, writing for the investigations website Drilled. And even more ironically, a major pilot project in the USA (the latest great hope for CCS advocates) has paused, thanks to uncertainties about another leak. Australian billionaire and green hydrogen fan Twiggy Forrest is also re-entering the fray, with his call for “real zero by 2040” instead of the ‘proven fantasy’ of net zero.
If you know you’re history
The super-short version of this history (and really, there’s a best-selling (1) and award-winning (2) book about this just waiting for your credit card details) is as follows
Man-made climate change first went properly viral in 1953. Oil companies have known about the possible problem of climate change for a long time. A Shell representative wrote an article in the New Scientist minimising it in…. Any takers? … October 1959.
In the early 1970s oil companies started -for entirely different reasons – capturing carbon dioxide and pushing it into oil wells. This was to push extra oil out so it could be sold and burned. This is known as “Enhanced Oil Recovery” and is still a large part of the business model for today’s CCS. The cannier among you may have noticed that doing this would not actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being released from below the ground into the atmosphere. In so many ways CCS is a Shrodinger’s Cat of a “climate mitigation” technology
In the mid-1970s, an Italian physicist, Cesar Marchetti, proposed large scale CCS as a climate solution (with storage being done in the deep oceans). (See my letter in Private Eye). There was a momentary flurry of interest in CCS in 1989, as politicians responded to scientific and public concerns about “the greenhouse effect”, but they quickly realised it would be incredibly expensive, risky and complicated. Attention turned to “clean coal.” In one of life’s little ironies, exactly 31 years ago today (October 4, 1993, the newly-appointed head of the World Coal Institute was reported as saying that the move toward clean coal technologies would be stepped up in the next five years.
With the coming of the Kyoto Protocol it was obvious that eventually some sort of climate technologies (whether actually implemented or not) would be needed by the fossil fuel companies and their supporters. The Blair Government started making appreciative noises, but refused to support a BP proposal in 2005-7. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a competition to support development and deployment of face-saving…. Sorry, coal-saving technology. That competition fizzled out, but not before a junior Tory minister in the Coalition government told Parliament in June 2010 that
… the coalition Government are committed to carbon capture and storage, which will be a major plank in our efforts to decarbonise our energy supply by 2030; we are committed to the generation of 5 GW of CCS by 2020.
Another competition began. Almost exactly nine years ago (late 2015) Treasurer George Osborne spectacularly and sneakily pulled the rug on a mere 1 billion pound competition (this was back in those innocent pre-pandemic days when 1 billion was real money).
CCS could have died as a policy option in the UK. That it didn’t is down to a relatively small loose network of highly-motivated and skilled individuals who brought it back from the dead. (In my book I call this the Kipling Manoeuvre, for, well, reasons. Did I mention my book is for sale in no good bookshops, but you can order it from good bookshops and bad. Also, online.)
That Kipling process of recreating a consensus around CCS was basically complete by November 2018. The last 6 years have been a spectacular go-slow, of perseverating, consultationitis, head-scratching, and can-kicking. Even the hosting of a COP didn’t get the UK government to make a decision….
That’s a very UK-centric history (the clue is in the title of The Book). For an international perspective, there are other books, academic articles, et cetera. And then there is this video.
Burning the uncapturable Midnight Oil
In February 1990, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were at about 353ppm, the Australian band Midnight Oil released a single “Blue Sky Mine”, also the title of the album.
It’s a banger.
It describes a corporate scandal around an asbestos mine. It will shock you to learn that the owners knew the dangers, but the workforce was cheap, disposable, and, well, what do you think happened?
Three lines come to mind
“They pay the truth makers…”
CCS is surrounded by armies of well-paid PR flaks, churning out soothing talking points. But they’re not the only truth makers. There are other people trusted to create “value-neutral” knowledge who may not always be quite so value-neutral as they want (everyone) to believe. There’s a rather interesting letter in today’s Financial Times…
The other lines – I will let you fill in the blanks – are
“And the company takes what the company wants.”
“And nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground”
What next? Expect “me too” and resistance. Accidents will happen
Four final predictions.
First, Scottish advocates of CCS will be unsurprised but fuming; always the bridesmaid… They might sing another Australian song “What About Me? “What about me? It isn’t fair. I don’t have enough, now I want my share”) and continues “And now I’m standing on the corner, All the world’s gone home Nobody’s changed, nobody’s been saved” I predict that the Scots will be singing it, lustily, via glossy reports, scientific papers and everything in between.
Second, the “anti-CCS” forces will grow, coalesce. Until now they have been relatively muted in the UK since a brief flurry in the late 2000s, when they killed off the idea of building new “capture-ready” coal-fired power plants..
Already there’s been an open letter signed by scientists trying to get the UK government to hit the pause button.
Local groups are stirring into action. See for eample
Expect more of these sorts of statements and campaigns (I will add to the list below) and, of course, expect counter-attacks from CCS’s powerful advocates (“uninformed,” “NIMBY,” “Luddite,” “anti-progress,” “hypocritical” etc)
Three, there will be further delays and reversals, over policy, funding, deployment. Don’t count out battles over the path of carbon dioxide pipelines, or the other transport infrastructure.
Don’t be surprised if the “permanent” storage isn’t quite as certain as the blithe assurances would have you believe.
Finally. In 1990 the atmospheric blanket of heat-trapping carbon dioxide was 354 ppm. This year it hit a new record of 426. It is absolutely certain next year will be higher. All the CCS in the world, all the “Direct Air Capture” in the world (don’t even start me on that) will not change that, ever. CCS would at best slow down the acceleration of the thickening of the blanket, at great cost.
We have no idea what we are into, and we have no idea which consequences are going to come how fast in which order. Buckle up.
Footnotes
- Actual facts may vary
- Actual facts may va