Britain’s Quixotic Carbon Capture Crusade – Watts Up With That?

From Tilak’s Substack

There is a certain tragicomic quality to Britain’s current climate policy. Having long proclaimed itself a “climate leader” on the world stage, the United Kingdom is now preparing to stake tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on technologies that have failed everywhere else. At the centre of this quixotic crusade is carbon capture and storage (CCS), with a special emphasis on its most extravagant and least viable variant – direct air capture (DAC). The problem is simple: CCS has an abysmal track record, DAC is even worse and no commercial project anywhere in the world has succeeded in delivering on the promises made with such fanfare.

And yet, here we are.

The Times reports that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is negotiating with Swiss firm Climeworks to develop Britain’s first DAC plant under the Government’s HyNet cluster. The proposal – code-named Silver Birch – would join a £21.7 billion CCS programme, with £9.4 billion earmarked for just the next four years.

It is worth pausing to consider what Britain is signing up for: paying prohibitive prices per tonne of CO₂ to bury molecules of a trace atmospheric gas essential to photosynthesis under the Irish Sea, with no evidence that the technology can be deployed at scale and with a track record of serial disappointment worldwide.

The Abysmal Record of CCS

CCS has been the subject of countless reports, academic papers and optimistic government pronouncements. Michael Cembalest, Chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for J.P. Morgan Asset & Wealth Management, observed wryly in 2021 that the number of academic papers written on CCS divided by real-life implementation of it yields “the highest ratio in the history of science”.

Despite billions spent in subsidies, tax credits and demonstration projects, the results have been paltry. After two decades of planning and conjecture, by the end of 2020 carbon capture and storage (CCS) facilities stored just 0.1% of global CO₂ emissions. Challenges include cost overruns, failure of bellwether projects, the US Department of Energy withdrawing support for demonstration projects, cancellations of projects in Europe, legal uncertainties about liability and a 20%-40% energy cost required to perform CCS in the first place. The UK’s own White Rose project at Drax, intended to capture two million tonnes annually, collapsed when the Cameron government cancelled its £1 billion CCS commercialisation programme in 2015.

Many of the “successes” were not climate mitigation projects at all but simply enhanced oil recovery operations, where CO₂ – typically using CO₂ from naturally occurring underground deposits – is pumped into wells to squeeze more hydrocarbons out of the ground. This is pursued as a profitable practice, unrelated to the decarbonisation agenda.

Signature failures in CCS projects abound. The Kemper project in Mississippi, once hailed as a model for “clean coal”, collapsed after costs ballooned past $7 billion. The FutureGen project in Illinois, backed by the US Department of Energy, was cancelled after years of delays and escalating costs. Australia’s Gorgon LNG CCS project, designed to capture up to four million tonnes a year, failed to meet its targets and faced technical challenges and leaks. Even Norway’s Sleipner field, often cited as an exemplar, captures less than a single power station emits and functions primarily because of favourable local geology. Europe’s grand Mongstad CCS plan was abandoned after the Norwegian state auditor called it “an embarrassing failure”.

The most telling statistic: after three decades of effort, no large-scale CCS project exists that operates economically without government subsidy, outside of enhanced oil recovery where profitability drives investment.

Direct Air Capture – Even Worse

If CCS attached to smokestacks has failed, DAC is an exercise in futility. CCS concentrates on capturing emissions at the point of release – power plants, cement factories or steel mills – while DAC aims to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The challenge is obvious. CO₂ in the atmosphere is just 0.04% of the air we breathe. According to a J.P. Morgan report, sequestering 25% of global CO₂ through direct air capture would require an astounding 25%–40% of the world’s electricity generation plus 11%–17% of its primary energy.

Climeworks, the world’s leading DAC company and among Fast Company’s “World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024”, built its Orca plant in Iceland in 2021, designed to capture 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually. Its larger Mammoth plant, now under construction, may eventually capture 36,000 tonnes a year – minuscule compared to global emissions of 37 billion tonnes. Even at optimistic estimates of $600 per tonne, the arithmetic collapses. More realistic figures put DAC costs closer to $1,200 per tonne. Compare this with the current EU carbon price of about £60 per tonne – a tenth or even a twentieth of DAC’s cost.

To capture just 1% of global emissions at DAC’s mid-range costs would run to trillions annually and consume an energy budget larger than that of many developed countries.

Britain’s Political Theatre

Why then is the UK pursuing this dead end? The answer lies in the fact that climate-focused virtue signalling and luxury beliefs now dominate elite behaviour. Successive governments, Conservative and Labour alike, have sought to position Britain as a global “climate leader”. Hosting COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, legislating a “Net Zero by 2050” target, and promoting offshore wind as the backbone of green energy were all part of this narrative. Now, CCS and DAC are being folded into the story as evidence that Britain is “doing something” about hard-to-abate sectors such as steel, cement and aviation.

The trouble is that this virtue signalling costs astronomical sums and delivers nothing of value. The HyNet project in Northwest England is projected to capture perhaps 4.5 million tonnes annually by 2030, scaling up to 10 million tonnes. Even if it succeeds – a heroic assumption – that is less than 3% of UK emissions which itself is less than 1% of global emissions. Meanwhile, the cluster will absorb billions in subsidies, increase energy costs for consumers and hand over subsidy-laden contracts to Climeworks or other contenders in the CCS sector.

DAC, the jewel in Miliband’s plan, is worse. Climeworks’ Silver Birch project, if built, would capture at best a few tens of thousands of tonnes per year. That would be the emissions equivalent of taking perhaps 10,000 cars off the road – a rounding error in Britain’s 370-million-tonne carbon footprint. Yet taxpayers are expected to bankroll it at hundreds if not thousands of pounds per tonne, while the EU carbon market (itself a concoction of the climate alarmist establishment in Brussels) says the same ton is worth only £60.

There is something quixotic in all this. Like Cervantes’ knight tilting at windmills, Britain’s leaders are charging headlong at imaginary foes, wasting treasure and deserving ridicule. The pursuit of CCS and DAC is not about rational cost-benefit analysis – it is about symbolism. Britain wants to lead. To lead in what, precisely, is unclear. If the goal is to waste money on technologies with no commercial track record, then yes, Britain is leading.

Interestingly, Dale Vince, Britain’s most high-profile “green” tycoon, has weighed in. Vince, an eco-grifter riding the wave of lavish subsidies for unreliable wind and solar, now dismisses DAC as “ridiculous” and “a million miles off working”. His critique, however, is revealing. Vince does not object to CCS/DAC primarily because it is a costly failure littered with abandoned projects worldwide. Rather, his opposition stems from the fact that CCS and DAC, if they ever worked, would give fossil fuels a longer lease of life — precisely what he most fears. For Vince and his ilk, the goal is not rational energy policy or cost-effectiveness, but the ideological elimination of hydrocarbons altogether, regardless of the consequences.

Europe’s Failures as Warnings

Britain need only look across the Channel to see the folly. Europe has tried and failed at CCS repeatedly. Germany’s Schwarze Pumpe CCS pilot was shut down in 2014 after Vattenfall concluded it was not viable. Norway’s Mongstad project was abandoned after nearly $1 billion spent. Even Northern Lights, Europe’s new CCS flagship, faces serious questions about costs, storage capacity and customer commitments.

These are not teething problems. They are systemic failures rooted in the economics and physics of the technology. CCS is expensive, energy-intensive and operationally fragile. DAC amplifies all these drawbacks. To press ahead regardless, as Britain is doing, is to ignore lessons bought dearly with other people’s money.

Asia Gets in on the Act

Alas, Britain and Europe are not alone in chasing the CCS mirage. East Asia, too, driven by the Japanese and South Korean initiatives in emission mitigation and the Paris Agreement, is joining the fray. Malaysia’s national oil company Petronas has signed MOUs with Japan and South Korea on CCS potential projects using the depleted oil and gas fields offshore peninsular Malaysia, Indonesia and elsewhere in the region.

Singapore has “hub partnership” with ExxonMobil and Shell to collaborate in CCS projects in the Southeast Asian region. Interestingly, these plans have sparked accusations of “carbon colonialism” from climate activists, who see exporting emissions for storage in another country as a “get out of jail free” card for continued fossil fuel use.

To be sure, East Asia is not the EU. While “Net Zero” and the Paris Agreement are real considerations among policymakers in the region, most countries are unapologetically reliant on fossil fuels for their economic growth and energy security needs. Shortly after President Trump assumed office and exited the US (a second time) from the Paris Agreement, Indonesia’s special envoy for climate change and energy Hashim Djojohadikusumo said not unreasonably that he considered the Paris Agreement no longer relevant for Indonesia following the US withdrawal from the deal.

The implementation of CCS projects in East Asia will ultimately depend on the extent to which governments are willing to underwrite them with subsidies, much as what the EU and the US governments did in the past two decades. Given the litany of failures in CCS projects in the West, perhaps the lessons learnt will not go completely to waste in the planning ministries in Tokyo, Seoul and Singapore.

Tilting at Windmills

The UK’s great gamble on CCS and DAC is not leadership but delusion. After decades of global failure, with no commercial project demonstrating viability, a Britain in steep economic decline is prepared to lavish over £20 billion on burying carbon dioxide underground. And all of this is premised on the still-untested dogma that carbon dioxide is the world’s “climate control knob”.

The recently published US Department of Energy report, authored by five eminent scientists, has challenged precisely this orthodoxy, questioning the IPCC’s alarmist literature and highlighting the deep uncertainties in climate sensitivity to CO₂. Meanwhile, NASA’s own satellite data show a greening of the earth over recent decades, with higher atmospheric CO₂ acting as a natural fertiliser for plants. If anything, modest CO₂ increases is likely a net benefit for agricultural productivity and ecosystems.

The US Department of Energy (DOE) under Secretary Wright recently announced the termination of 24 funding awards from its Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), totalling over $3.7 billion in taxpayer-funded financial assistance, primarily for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) and decarbonisation projects.

The Trump administration’s pragmatic stance on “energy dominance” cuts through the fog: CO₂ has economic value if deployed for enhanced oil recovery where it supports greater hydrocarbon output. No subsidies are required. The market dictates the costs and benefits, as it should. Outside of that, in the view of Energy Secretary Chris Wright and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, pouring US taxpayers’ money into CCS is little more than virtue signalling dressed up as policy.

Future historians may indeed view this era not as the moment humankind rose to the “climate challenge”, but as one where governments squandered resources tilting at an imaginary enemy, vilifying a trace gas that sustains plant life, while ignoring the real challenges of energy security, economic growth and prosperity.

Britain’s CCS crusade championed by the climate zealot Ed Miliband, far from being a mark of leadership, may ultimately stand as a cautionary tale of how “climate leadership” ambitions and economically-illiteracy can override both science and economics.

The article was first published in The Daily Sceptic https://dailysceptic.org/2025/08/23/britains-quixotic-carbon-capture-crusade/

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