Carbon capture and storage (CCS), and its twin carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS), has been in the news recently. Ed Miliband, secretary of state for energy security and net zero, has announced £22bn of investment in the technology. Two clusters for initial development have been announced in Teesside and Merseyside. And on 7 February 2025, the Public Accounts Committee released its report on CCUS. What is the significance of these developments?
What is CCUS and how does it work?
CCUS is an industrial process designed to separate and capture carbon dioxide (CO2)from the flue gas stream in a power station or manufacturing process.
In theory, the flue gas is cleaned up and passed through a solvent to dissolve the CO2, before the rest of the flue gases are sent up the chimney as normal. So far so good.
Why is it controversial?
Capturing carbon is very energy intensive. It uses between 10% and 30% of a power station’s electricity just to run itself: so it either reduces the amount of energy going to our homes, or increases the amount of fossil fuel burned. This creates an ‘energy debt’, making it a really expensive system to run.
It also means that nobody will implement it without huge government subsidies.
And it doesn’t work very well. Almost all power generation CCUS projects worldwide have been cancelled, either at the design stage or after a few years of operation. This is because either the operators found it too expensive to run, or the technology was too unreliable. Or typically, both.
And CCUS systems have failed to capture as much carbon as planned. Instead of capturing and storing the claimed 90–95% of CO2 to protect the atmosphere, the two systems that are still operational are capturing at best 50–60%, meaning nearly half of climate-wrecking CO2 still ends up in the atmosphere.
A dirty and risky solution
CCUS is dirty. The amine solvent has a habit of leaking into the atmosphere where it is toxic to life – including humans. UK government’s plans to create clusters of industries with CCUS attached, will increase health risks to both people and nature. Neither the planning system nor the Environment Agency licensing process is considering the cumulative effects from multiple sites.
Storing CO2 requires long pipelines and pumping stations with specially engineered properties and carefully controlled conditions. An early plan of using old gas mains will not be adequate. CO2 needs high-quality steel pipework to withstand the high pressure, and it needs to be dry to avoid corrosion. And there’s no real evidence that, once pumped into old oil fields or undersea aquifers, it will stay there forever. All of this adds to the costs of CCUS systems, and the risks to the climate.
Natural carbon capture
There is of course another way to capture carbon – through nature: forests, kelp, sea grass, peat and soil. We assume that everyone knows about tree-planting projects to capture and store carbon, but there are plenty of other natural systems that store carbon at least as well as trees, often better.
We hear a lot about peat restoration on our regional Yorkshire news, and it is true that restored and protected peat bogs will begin to capture carbon again, and continue to do so indefinitely. Elsewhere, coastal shallows all over the world are essential breeding grounds for fish. Mangrove swamps in the tropics do this really well, and also slow high tides and protect from floods. In temperate seas, either seagrass or kelp can store significant amounts of carbon as well as acting as fish nurseries (as this article by Angus Young touches on). Nature-based solutions typically offer multiple benefits.
Finally, soil. A few years ago, there was a slew of stories warning the world’s soils only had 60 harvests left. This led to an acceleration of research and expansion of regenerative agriculture, which has demonstrated that restoring and regenerating soil across the world has an enormous capacity to store carbon now and into the future.
What is carbon ‘usage’?
Once captured, the CO2 can be diverted to another industrial process instead of being pumped straight underground. Which in theory sounds ideal, as CO2 is used as a raw material in a number of chemical processes. But a number of these industries, including the fertiliser manufacture and petrochemicals, are already under question for their lack of sustainability, their reliance on fossil fuels and their place in a regenerative and circular economy.
There may be a ‘use case’ for CCUS in one or two industries such as cement and petrochemicals which are difficult to decarbonise. But it is a struggle to see why it should be applied to electricity generation, steel and glass – all of which have genuine, renewable alternatives.
These are not simple questions with simple answers. Together, they raise serious concerns about the justification for developing the whole, questionable, carbon capture industry that has no guarantee of actually working.
Public Accounts Committee report
It is because of these controversies that the Public Accounts Committee made its call for evidence on CCUS. Just Transition Wakefield was among those submitting evidence, and you can read the full submission online, as well as those of other contributors. The committee’s final report makes for very interesting reading. If nothing else, the (short) summary is well worth a look.
The committee reports that although the UK Climate Change Committee believes that CCUS is essential to meet net zero, the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero has reduced its CCUS ambitions, stating that original targets for captured carbon of 20 to 30 million tonnes of stored CO2 a year are no longer achievable. Where, then, does that leave the government’s plan?
Damning words on costs and reliability
The committee also picked up on, and highlighted the fact that, of the £22bn in subsidies for CCUS, only one quarter of this will come from the exchequer (public funds). The other three quarters will come from each one of us as extra levies on our electricity bills. Emma Pinchbeck, chair of the UK Climate Change Committee, has said that this approach is regressive and will make our already high bills even higher. This does not sound like a just transition for UK citizens.
The committee recognises that the technology is unreliable. It reminds the government that the first CCUS projects need careful performance monitoring with respect to the government’s exposure to commercial risk. The committee reinforces its scepticism by highlighting that the government needs alternative ways of reducing emissions if/when there are delays or, more likely, if the CCUS technology doesn’t work as well as advertised. This is quite damning from a normally cautious government committee.
The government will also need to address whether it will be monitoring actual capture rates, and emissions along the whole supply chain, to evaluate climate risk as well as financial risk.
Carbon capture is more greenwash
Ultimately, carbon capture, usage and storage is a scam. It is a ruse to allow the continued burning of fossil fuels, the continuing profiteering by oil and gas corporations, and the continuing climate-wrecking emissions of CO2 and methane.
Oil companies have made billions in excessive profits. They receive subsidies and tax breaks, while we live with the constant threat of flooding, heatwaves and food insecurity, all as a result of accelerating climate change. Extending the use of methane, in the form of liquified natural gas as North Sea gas runs out, will continue to build methane levels in the atmosphere, which will of course accelerate global heating still further.
It seems that the government is keen to push this climate gamble and to force us to pay for it through our electricity bills.
