How to end the tug-of-war over carbon capture

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of those technologies that cleaves climate advocates. Critics call it an expensive, untested technology, proponents say it is useful.

By Lara Williams

At the end of September, the UK was being cheered and celebrated for becoming the first G-7 nation to fully ditch coal-fired electricity. Just a few days later, the unified voice of celebration had splintered as people accused the government of making an expensive climate misstep by committing to carbon capture and storage development.

Ministers have pledged almost £22 billion ($29 billion) over 25 years to support the UK’s first carbon capture and storage projects. The funding will aid the delivery of two industrial clusters in Merseyside and Teesside, supporting undersea storage and pipelines as well as carbon capture at three projects producing blue hydrogen, power and energy-from-waste. It builds on a pledge to spend £20 billion over two decades on the technology made by a Conservative government in 2023.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of those technologies that cleaves climate advocates. The term refers to a range of methods to trap carbon dioxide at a point source — for instance, at a gas power plant or a cement manufacturing facility — and store it deep underground (such as in old oil fields). Critics call it an expensive, untested technology that will perpetuate fossil-fuel use. Environmental campaigner George Monbiot, for example, wrote in a 2023 Guardian column that “the sole purpose of CCS is to justify the granting of more oil and gas licenses.”

Proponents say that it’s a useful — even vital — tool for reducing emissions from hard-to-abate sectors. In an emailed statement, Steve Smith, executive director of CO2RE Hub and Oxford Net Zero at the University of Oxford’s Smith School, said: “CCS is one of the crucial parts in the whole jigsaw that makes up a clean, green UK for the future. It’s not an alternative to better home insulation, renewables, electric cars and the like; it’s an additional requirement if we are serious about the climate.”

Smith also notes that, of the three projects being funded and a further five still under negotiations, only one is a gas power plant. The rest will capture carbon from other industrial processes such as energy from waste, hydrogen production and cement manufacturing.

So it’s unfair to say that CCS is only about extending the life of fossil fuels. But there are questions to be raised about which applications should be supported by taxpayer money. A 2023 report from climate-change think tank E3G and nonprofit Bellona Foundation ranked the value of different use cases for 2030 and 2050, based on competition from alternatives, mitigation potential, feasibility and what the CO2 source is. It found that CCS’s climate value is greatest for industrial applications such as cement and lime, which may be impossible to fully decarbonize without the use of this technology.

It makes sense to direct public money to these applications. That’s not to say CCS shouldn’t be applied to anything else — the UK is planning to use gas with CCS to help balance a decarbonized energy grid, and the technology plays a large role in several carbon removal methods — but that the decision over who has the responsibility to pay should be carefully considered. In some cases, the onus should be placed on fossil-fuel producers.

One way to achieve this would be via a carbon takeback obligation (CTBO), which would mandate producers to store the CO2-equivalent back underground to a rising fraction of that generated by the hydrocarbons they have extracted. Such a policy, phased in until all emissions are covered, would make polluters pay for the cleanup and help fund what Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford, calls a CO2 disposal industry — which would later form the backbone of efforts to remove the CO2 we’ve added to the atmosphere.

While many claim that CCS remains untested, Allen argues that the technology has been around for decades but that there’s never been an obligation to use it: “Until fossil-fuel producers are required to use CCS, it’s not going to scale.”

Officials are reluctant to introduce regulations that may be impossible to comply with, creating a sort of chicken-and-egg problem: What comes first, the obligation to do it or the means? But there has been a recent shift toward something closer to a CTBO with the European Union’s Net Zero Industry Act, which came into force in June.

The act includes a historic measure to require EU-based oil and gas producers to furnish CO2 storage capacity, with individual contributions based on their production levels from 2020 to 2023. While it’s only a capacity mandate for now, it represents the first time emitters have been put on the hook for the climate impacts caused by their products, and it’s easy to see how it could progress to being a sequestration obligation in the future.

Discounting CCS completely would be a mistake, but we should have more nuanced conversations about what to use it for — like industrials and carbon removal — and how to fund it. In the interest of fairness, the UK would be wise to take a leaf out of the EU’s book.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.