Carbon capture plan is a colossal waste of money

The government’s carbon capture scheme is an expensive distraction, argues Dr Richard Carter, while Kate Macintosh and Edric Brown call for a more far-sighted solution to curb emissions

George Monbiot rightly eviscerates the government’s foolish plan to waste nearly £22bn on the carbon capture and storage (CCS) venture (Labour’s carbon-capture scheme will be Starmer’s white elephant: a terrible mistake costing billions, 11 October). But he only hints at a worse aspect of the plan: that it is entirely unproven to work on the scale needed to be effective, as many studies have shown.

A study of the health and climate impacts of carbon capture, in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, found that only 10.8% of one such plant’s CO2-equivalent emissions and 10.5% of the CO2 removed from the air is captured over 20 years, and only 20 to 31% is captured over 100 years. In addition, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finds that “CCS is an expensive and unproven technology that distracts from global decarbonisation efforts while allowing oil and gas industries to conduct business as usual.”

This spells out exactly why the oil and gas extraction firms are so strongly in favour of CCS: it allows them to continue making their obscene profits at our expense – and of that of the future of the planet.
Dr Richard Carter
Putney, London

 The government’s carbon capture and storage proposal shows either their ignorance of the advice from all independent scientific experts (that CCS is quite the least energy-efficient way to get carbon out of the atmosphere) or that they are in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby to which they are throwing a lifebuoy. Carbon dioxide only makes up a tiny proportion of the atmosphere (0.04%), so capturing it requires a lot of electricity. Best just to stop generating emissions.

A much more far-sighted investment would be to release Britain’s unrivalled potential for tidal-power generation, now a mature technology, by extending the electrical distribution network down our coastlines. The jobs created would utilise Britain’s marine and electrical engineering skills, provide reliable generation, thereby eliminating the argument for further nuclear power stations and hasten the day when we are free of all reliance on fossil fuels.

Catching and burying carbon dioxide emissions from power stations, oil and gas fields and steel and cement plants has been ongoing for 20 years, but it has spectacularly failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, its only clear successes involve enhanced oil recovery: carbon dioxide is used to drive oil out of geological formations that are otherwise difficult to exploit.

With astonishing chutzpah, some oil companies have claimed the small amount of carbon that remains trapped in the rocks as a climate benefit.
Kate Macintosh
Winchester

 I was disappointed but perhaps not surprised to read Rachel Reeves’ celebration of the government’s funding of carbon capture as the start of their “green revolution”. She might as well have said the government was investing £22bn of our taxes in bitcoin over the next 25 years. The environmental impact would be similar, as would the efficacy of the technology.

The only proven carbon capture is the fossil fuel industry’s capture of our media and politicians, as evidenced by this new form of fossil fuel subsidy. If they wanted to invest in unproven technology, the government could have chosen any of the new forms of bulk energy storage that we will need to develop to make our grid resilient to the intermittent nature of renewable generation. But no, we get fossil-fuel snake oil instead.

Edric Brown
London

Cover photo: By The Guardian