UK won't reach net zero without carbon capture – so why do we keep 'screwing it up'?

Experts on carbon capture have warned Keir Starmer to move away from Rishi Sunak’s optimism on the sci-fi-sounding climate technology, with the future of the UK’s plans up in the air after a change in government.

Carbon capture – known by the initialism CCUS, or carbon capture, utilisation and storage – involves sucking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it, or removing it from emissions being pumped out of industries like cement and natural gas.

The Conservative government, bullish on the technology of CCUS, announced a target for the UK to capture and store up to 30 million tonnes of carbon per year by 2030, at a cost of £20bn. 

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Such was the optimism over the technology that the UK now does not have a path to net zero without carbon capture succeeding, said the National Audit Office (NAO) in July.

“UK policy makers should curb their enthusiasm with CCUS, because they are aiming for a target that is way too high compared to what the country can realistically achieve,” said Lorenzo Sani, a policy analyst at Carbon Tracker.

“They’re targeting some sectors where the implementation of CCUS is still very risky and very costly, and so we believe this is a little bit of a recipe for failure”

Carbon capture has become crucial to the UK’s legally-binding climate ambitions, said the NAO in July, with a report finding “the government does not have and is currently not developing a credible alternative pathway without the use of CCUS”.

The government is expected to make decisions in September on the “track one” projects – the HyNet Cluster in North West England and North Wales, and an East Coast Cluster in Humberside and Teeside. The UK government has also banned new energy waste plans which don’t have carbon capture, while the National Infrastructure Commission wants retrofitting of existing plants to begin.

But widespread carbon capture has already been abandoned twice in the UK: launches in 2011 and 2016 were cancelled over funding issues, which the NAO said “dented industry confidence” in the government’s commitment to the technology.

In the face of this, Sani urged the UK to go “back to the drawing board” and find a more realistic strategy. “There is a risk that if it fails this time, it might not be implemented any more,” Sani added.

Government support is lagging behind schedule, with the decisions now planned for September originally scheduled for the end of 2023. 

Suez, one firm planning to invest in the East Coast Cluster on Teeside, is waiting for the government to agree extra funding before it pumps more of its own money in.

“It doesn’t currently look likely that we’ll hit the targets that were set by the previous government,” said Liam Hardy, a senior policy analyst at Green Alliance. “It would surprise me if any of those four clusters were operating at full capacity by 2030,” Hardy said, adding he believed firms wanted to move faster, but needed more government certainty to do so.

“I’m not the world’s biggest fan of CCUS, but I don’t want them to screw it up for the third time in the last two decades,” he said.

But Hardy urged caution on over-reliance: “We don’t want to lock ourselves into relying on it in the very long term for things that aren’t the best climate solution”.

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