Carbon capture, or political capture?

Greenpeace UK’s policy director Doug Parr said the investment would “extend the life of planet-heating oil and gas production”. Does this technology hold up to scrutiny, and what role, if any, should it play in decarbonisation?

The UK government’s projects are based around CCUS, which involves usage of captured carbon, as opposed to just carbon capture and storage (CCS). In CCS, CO₂ released from industry or energy generation is captured, transported and stored, often underground. 

This prevents greenhouse gas emissions at source. In CCUS, however, the carbon captured is used for industry, with the CO₂ emissions from this extra step being stored.

Burning

Despite the UK government’s aim to deploy CCUS, there are uncertainties about the carbon neutrality of this extra usage step. The reputation of CCUS is harmed by the fact that around 73 per cent of CCUS projects use the captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery (EOR). 

EOR is a technique favoured by oil companies, where CO₂ is injected into oil wells allowing them to extract more oil. Given the environmental motivation to move away from fossil fuels, this seems a counterintuitive use of CCUS.

The uncertainty around CCS and CCUS explains the scepticism to the implementation of the technology in the UK, even if the government is not planning to use it for EOR. 

Instead, the government plans to use CCS with bioenergy and growth of biofuel crops, known as bioenergy, carbon capture and storage (BECCS), which in theory would make bioenergy carbon neutral by capturing emitted CO₂, and even potentially carbon negative as plants used for biofuels remove CO₂ from the atmosphere as they grow. 

However, if CCS is to be used at a large scale, then BECCS may not be able to expand in the same way, as burning biomass has a low efficiency, and to grow crops land-use changes like deforestation will occur which increase CO₂  emissions.

Expectations

The perception of CCS has also been harmed by the use of carbon credits, permits that allow companies to emit a certain amount of carbon as long as they ‘offset’ it through carbon capture. 

Environmental groups argue that this is ‘greenwashing’ because CCS projects globally have failed to capture planned amounts of carbon. This enables emitters to brand themselves as ‘green’ based on a promise rather than a binding commitment. 

Similarly, the UK’s climate targets are legally binding, but their CCUS targets to meet this are not. It makes sense, then, that they tend to be overoptimistic, with the UK’s Track-1 target having to be lowered due to the complexity of the project.

There is a lack of trust in ‘techno-fixes’ to climate change pioneered by oil and gas companies. This makes sense since they have contributing to greenhouse gas emissions for decades, and environmental pressure groups fear that economic motivations may eclipse environmental ones.

CCUS and CCS have a track record for not living up to expectations. Commercial projects worldwide have been unsuccessful in meeting carbon capture targets. 

Retrofitted

Chevron’s Gorgon CCS plant in Western Australia underperformed its targets in the first five years by about 50 per cent, and the CCS technology at the Kemper natural gas plant in the US was demolished in 2021 after leaks. 

Gas leakage from CCS projects not only poses a safety risk, but also contaminates groundwater and emits stored carbon back into the atmosphere. To reduce gas leakage risk, storage sites will have to be studied in detail, but this will slow deployment of the technology.

Canada’s Boundary Dam was a first-of-a-kind CCS project that captured emissions from coal, and only captured 65% of CO₂ emissions versus a target of 90%. The novel nature of carbon capture, especially in areas where it has never been used or scaled up before, is bound to lead to technical difficulties like these, and CCS may not prove to be applicable in these sectors.

These global failures call into question the viability of the UK’s CCUS goals, which have already suffered setbacks. The carbon capture goal for Stage-1 was originally 15.5 million tonnes per year, more in line with its net zero targets, but was reduced to 8.5 million tonnes due to delivery constraints. 

Costs may also increase at the construction stage, which is still extensive even though technology will be retrofitted into existing power plants. Several countries around the world are also currently pursuing CCUS, so there is a risk that limitations in global supply lead to delays. 

Leaked

These barriers for implementation mean that the £21.7 billion of funding for the current CCUS programme may not be enough to meet government’s ambitions for CCUS deployment to 2030. This could bring similar risks to those that caused projects being cancelled in the past.

Even if the technology functions as predicted, there are uncertainties about the viability of the storage sites involved in the plans. According to government estimates, there is room for 78bn tonnes of captured carbon to be stored on the continental shelf under the Irish and North seas. 

However, due to a lack of real-world experience of CO₂ storage, there may be limitations to the sites themselves. According to an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, geological storage of carbon may not be an option in some locations, even in areas previously used for oil and gas extraction. 

Carbon previously stored in the underwater Norwegian Sleipner site was found to have leaked, and the Snohvit site had a smaller capacity than geological modelling predicted. 

Taking these concerns into account, backup sites may be needed in the UK, which is another barrier to large scale CCUS in the UK as it will cause mounting costs that could put projects in jeopardy.

Construction

Another technological method proposed to reduce carbon emissions is artificial direct air capture (DAC), which involves machines directly removing CO₂ from the atmosphere, artificial direct air capture through machines. 

This is carbon negative in theory, as it leads to an overall decrease in carbon in the atmosphere, whereas CCS is carbon neutral as it captures carbon before it has been emitted. 

However, artificial carbon removal using methods such as DAC has only been implemented on a small scale worldwide. It only captures around 2 million tonnes of CO₂ compared to the 45 million tonnes per year for CCS, owing to the extremely high cost needed to remove carbon straight from the atmosphere where it is of a lower concentration. DAC is therefore still unproven as a scalable technology, but it is planned to form part of the UK’s CCUS plans after Track-1.

The UK plans to develop a large-scale blue hydrogen project as part of its CCUS programme named EET Hydrogen, which the government says is “the cleanest in the world”. 

As blue hydrogen is hydrogen manufactured from natural gas (methane), a fossil fuel and potent greenhouse gas, it is unclear whether this will reduce emissions. UK rules prohibit high-emission Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to be used to produce hydrogen, but the UK has approved the construction of a LNG terminal at Teesside, these rules need to be enforced as it will be harder to source the hydrogen in a ‘green’ way as CCUS expands. 

Solar

A large-scale hydrogen project sourced from natural gas is likely to extend natural gas usage beyond the level it is needed for to make up for the unreliability of renewables. 

There is a danger that blue hydrogen with CCS will become like EOR in its reliance on extracting more fossil fuels, thereby worsening the problem it claims to solve. 

The claim that hydrogen should have a significant role in heating buildings has been disproven, as well as for transport systems, where electrification is preferred as a decarbonisation method. Thus, the UK’s plans to use CCS with DAC and blue hydrogen production may hinder decarbonisation rather than aiding it. 

Neither carbon capture nor artificial carbon removal are taking place at the scale required to balance global carbon emissions from human activities, which were 37.4bn tonnes in 2023. These uncertainties mean that it is not guaranteed that the cost of CCS will fall, nor that it will become viable in the future.

Costs for CCS and CCUS projects have not significantly fallen for the 40 years they have existed as potential technologies. In comparison, solar energy costs have fallen by 90 per cent in the last decade, and offshore wind by 60 per cent. 

Global

However, proponents of CCUS say it can follow the same trend if government policy supports it through subsidies, and if it boosts economic growth, thereby attracting private investment. This is far from guaranteed, though, given the complexities and unknowns CCUS as a technology is still fraught with. 

Environmental groups argue that renewable energy could be scaled up faster if it is given the economic backing CCUS has been given, especially since there is concrete evidence of renewables becoming cheaper with investment and implementation. 

Claire James, from the Campaign against Climate Change, a pressure group that signed an open letter opposing the government’s CCUS plans, said Labour had “a great opportunity” to tackle the climate crisis by investing in “basic things we know work” such as insulating homes, renewable energy and public transport.

However, scrapping all CCUS plans under the assumption that renewables can be relied on for all decarbonisation purposes may not be the best idea. There are limitations to the efficacy of renewables in reducing carbon emissions, and there are decarbonisation advantages unique to CCUS.

CCUS does have unique advantages, and the International Energy Agency and the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) see it as a key element to combat climate change on a global scale. In fact, the CCC says it is a “necessity, not an option’” to meet the UK’s climate goals. 

Unreliability

Some environmental groups agree that CCUS is the only option to reduce carbon emissions from “hard-to-abate” sectors of heavy industry, such as cement, steel and chemical production. These require heat from fossil-fuel driven furnaces and account for about 15% of the world’s emissions total. 

However, some carbon emissions in heavy industry sectors have been reduced by recycling (40% of all steel is recycled, for example), so using CCUS to capture CO₂ released from producing steel may be missing the point. 

CCUS must be heavily regulated even in these sectors to ensure no more raw materials are extracted than is necessary, and research should be undertaken to explore ways to reduce emissions from ‘hard-to-abate’ sectors, like electrification. 

Even CCUS may not help in decarbonising these sectors, as it has not been used with cement production on a commercial scale, so just because it’s probably vital doesn’t mean it’s fully implementable and scalable. 

Another justification to use CCUS is that renewables cannot carry the full burden of decarbonisation. Due to the unreliability of wind and solar, there will still be a need for a baseline supply of natural gas in the UK, and CCUS can help to capture the resulting carbon emissions. 

Decarbonisation

At the same time this will reduce system costs on the national grid and maintain energy security. The alternatives for a baseline supply such as hydrogen storage are more expensive.

Natural carbon removal methods such as afforestation are essential, but may need to occur alongside CCUS, rather than instead of it. In the IPCC’s scenarios in which warming is kept close to 1.5°C, we eliminate deforestation almost immediately and restore 250 billion tonnes of CO₂ to the biosphere by 2100 through actions such as forest and wetland restoration. Over the same period, we capture four times that amount of CO₂ through various forms of CCS, and reduce fossil fuel use by 75 per cent to 80 per cent. 

However, this model may not reflect the reality of the path to net zero for countries like the UK that are aiming to rely greatly on CCUS. As long as CCUS is being used on a large scale, there is a limit to how much fossil fuel usage can be reduced, even if we ignore the concerns that CCUS will ‘lock in’ fossil fuel usage.

Moreover, there is uncertainty about whether CCUS will end up being limited to heavy industry and production of a baseline supply of energy, especially since the UK’s CCUS plan is a key part of its climate portfolio. 

If CCUS is scaled up, what will prevent fossil fuels from continuing to be a large part of the UK’s energy mix? Especially if carbon capture targets prove unrealistic and are not met, which is a real possibility, CCUS will end up functioning more as an excuse for a ‘business as usual’ approach than a radical decarbonisation technology.

Transition

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that it can be used to reduce emissions from large-scale fossil-fuel based industry and energy sources, but ‘must not become the only focus in emissions reduction’. 

This begs the question, wouldn’t it be more beneficial for the government to invest money to allow the phasing out of fossil fuels to occur more quickly, and at the same time make alternatives such as renewables, electrification and insulation more viable? 

According to an IPCC report, keeping ‘likely’ temperatures below 2°C could require capturing as much as 11 billion tons of CO₂ per year by 2050. CCUS schemes like the one proposed in the UK must at the very most, be only seen as a small part of emissions reduction. 

Clearly carbon capture must not replace developments in wind, solar and nuclear, as well as natural carbon removal strategies such as restoring peatlands and planting trees, and demand reduction solutions such as home insulation.

Due to the failure of many projects worldwide, there are functional and safety concerns about carbon capture in the UK, as well as fear that it will lock the UK into using fossil fuels, slowing the transition to renewables. 

Subsidy

Also, the installation of the projects themselves may emit large amounts of CO₂. Alarmingly, a recent study by energy analyst Andrew Boswell indicated that the proposed multibillion-pound CCS project in Teesside would be responsible for more than 20m tonnes of planet-heating CO₂ over its lifetime. 

The potential for these upstream emissions challenges the view of CCUS as a ‘net zero’ technology. There is uncertainty on whether these emissions will be worth the payoff of eventual carbon capture.

The many uncertainties surrounding CCUS may be solved with time, but seeing that the EU’s 2023 Commission Proposals are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 to meet net zero by 2050, time is not what we have. 

Undoubtedly, CCS will have to be used in hard-to-abate sectors, as one of the ‘technologies at our disposal’, but its success on a large scale is unproven. Unfortunately, CCUS is both unproven and probably essential – therein lies the dilemma. 

One thing is clear: CCUS should not become an endless subsidy which allows private industry to keep profiting. If it does, it will send a message that deploying CCUS is sufficient to combat climate change, even if investment in more proven projects could have reduced carbon emissions much more. 

Renewables

How do we stop CCUS becoming a solely economic consideration rather than an environmental one? Governments and IGOs will have to regulate its use and restrict it to sectors that require CCS to decarbonise. 

At the same time, Labour needs to invest in smaller renewable energy providers with the goal to scale these up as well, even if this means sacrificing some of the carbon capture budget. 

If CCUS is successful in being scaled up, UK government could also make it clear that anyone selling fossil fuels in the UK will be responsible for geological disposal of all CO₂ generated by their activities and the products they sell. 

However, if the UK’s plans go the same way as Gorgon and Kemper, renewables must still be the backbone of emissions reduction. If they don’t, and carbon capture and storage really has become a ‘distraction’, then there may be nothing to fall back on.

This Author

Luke Jackson is a student at the College of Richard Collyer in West Sussex. He is soon to study English literature at Oxford University with a view to a career in teaching. He is particularly concerned with the viability of different climate change mitigation strategies. 

The College of Richard Collyer is a sixth-form college in West Sussex whose English department has run a competition through the 2024-25 academic year in partnership with The Ecologist online, open to all upper-sixth students, to develop their journalistic skills by exploring environmental interests and concerns.