Net-zero: impotence writ large

By Richard North - February 8, 2025

There are certain things which are so mad that they should never be considered to be part of any public policy mix. Carbon capture is one of this, a concept so utterly devoid of good sense that one would have thought it could not stand exposure to the light of day without its progenitors being mocked into oblivion.

And yet, although I was writing about this issue in September 2008, it is still with us today and very much part of the policy mix which goes to making up that collective insanity known as net-zero.

It is worth noting that, although in its current form, the policy is currently the child of the cretinous Ed Miliband, it originated way back then with Conservative support, floated by then shadow trade secretary as a way of keeping coal in our electricity generation mix while still aspiring to mad-hatter greenhouse gas emission cuts.

It says a great deal for the insanity of the time that the idea was discussed with approval in a Times editorial which referred to an experimental plant in Spremberg, Germany, aimed at – in the paper’s words – cleaning up “the filthy process of making electricity from coal – and hence tackle the looming threat of climate change”.

Noting that the CCS technology had not yet been proven from power stations at scale and, nor, crucially, was it clear enough how much it might cost, the paper suggested that the pilot plant in Spremberg would advance knowledge on both fronts, and spawn larger demonstration projects.

In so doing, we were told that the Germans and the Swedes (whose Vattenfall company was financing the project) had “stolen a march on Britain”, with the project dating back to 2006. Even then, UK ministers had launched a competition for a CCS pilot scheme, but nothing had been built. Yet, horror of horrors, those same ministers had appeared willing to give the green light to new coal-fired power stations without the technology.

Utilities in Britain had been “waiting around for subsidy”, while Vattenfall had been putting its own money into the project. It could, the paper complained, reap enormous commercial rewards, not least from China, which is sitting on enormous coal reserves. Thus, it declared: “The race for clean coal is on. The British need to catch up”.

Would that we had all paid much more attention to that scheme for, a year later in the July, the Guardian was telling us that Vattenfall had admitted that the €70 million project was venting the CO2 straight into the atmosphere.

The intention had been to transport up to 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the power plant each year and inject it into depleted gas reservoirs at a giant gasfield near the Polish border, with injecting due to start by March or April. But a permit had not materialised “as a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project”.

At that time, the spread of localised resistance was believed to be a force that some feared “could sink Europe’s attempts to build 10 to 12 demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2015”, even though the ubiquitous “scientists” argued that public safety fears are groundless and that the consequences of escaping CO2 would be to the climate, not to public health.

However, it wasn’t “local resistance” which finally did for the scheme. In May 2014 Vattenfall announced that it was ending all carbon capture research and development at the plant having found that “its costs and the energy it requires make the technology unviable”.

Furthermore, this wasn’t the only failure. In 2011, Vattenfall had closed down a large project at a pilot plant in Jänschwalde, in eastern Germany, launched initially with EU funding worth €45 million. At an overall coast of €1.5 billion, the project had been planned to start operations in 2015, leaving Vattenfall to blame “insufficient will in German federal politics”.

Nor were things in Europe to get any better. By March 2013, the European Commission was lamenting that, despite its support for 12 large-scale projects by 2015, “CCS has not yet taken off in Europe”. In October 2017, EU Observer was reporting that, after the expenditure of €567 million, the EU had managed to procure precisely zero CCS plants.

Now fast-forward to yesterday and we find the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) publishing a report which is somewhat less than optimistic about UK progress in this mad venture.

The press release observing that the government’s backing of unproven, first-of-a-kind technology to reach net zero “is high-risk”.

Although the government considers CCS as essential to fulfilling its legally mandated net zero by 2050 goals, there are no examples of the technology operating at scale in the UK. Furthermore, CCS “may not capture as much carbon as expected”, with international examples showing that government’s expectations for its performance are far from guaranteed.

Thus, the report calls on the government to assess whether its full carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) programme will be affordable for taxpayers and consumers, given wider pressures on energy bills and the cost of living.

Interestingly, the Financial Times takes the story further, telling us that “Britain’s gamble” on CCS is facing the threat of Treasury cuts once it has completed its scrutiny of current projects in this year’s spending review.

As it stands, the government commitment amounts to £21.7 billion in funding over 25 years, but so far, money has only been allocated to two regions – in Teesside and Merseyside. Other projects earmarked for Humber and Scotland are unlikely to go ahead, with the Treasury unenthusiastic about spending any more money on the technology.

In December, it seems, Sarah Jones, energy minister, told the Commons energy committee that the previous Conservative government’s CCS target of 20-30 million tonnes of CO2 annually by 2030 was “no longer achievable”. And, with that, a Treasury insider says that given the tight economic backdrop, the case for further big investment in CCS is not yet clear, the insider noting: “We have to see if it works, or not”.

Predictably, though, the Department for Energy Security remains bullish in its public comments. “Carbon capture, usage and storage is vital to boost our energy independence, and the Climate Change Committee describes it as a ‘necessity not an option’ for reaching our climate goals”, it says, adding: “There is no route to protecting jobs in our industrial heartlands and securing the future of heavy industry in the UK without it”.

However, the cretinous Miliband seems to be going off the idea with insiders saying he sees the development of the Sizewell C nuclear power station as his top priority.

Despite all this, though, the European Commission is persevering with the mad ideas, having last year approved a €3 billion Swedish scheme to support CCS. This will be linked to projects that permanently capture and store CO2 emissions from biomass plants that use recycled wood, and other waste to produce fuel, electricity and heat.

We are told that the aid will be awarded through a competitive bidding process, with the first auction expected this year. Under 15-year long contracts, companies will receive grants for projects with the capacity to capture and store at least 50,000 tonnes of biogenic CO2 per year.

Thus far have the mighty fallen with all those early ambitions shrinking to a level where this is all that is being proposed while leaving the UK with what the Telegraph calls a policy prospectus that is not so much confused as incoherent.

Miliband’s £22 billion investment in “unproven” carbon capture and storage technologies, it says, “is a perfect case in point”. This policy appears set to cost British households an average of up to £800 each, with no guaranteed return, while some experts doubt the technology will ever be viable at the scale envisioned.

So, twenty years or so down the line, we are in fact not very much further forward than when we started, apart from the hundreds of millions already wasted on a technology that would put Jonathan Swift’s Academy of Lagado to shame.

Yet, through all these years, no one seems to have had the ability nor determination to close down this madness, so we continue to dribble endless funds into something which should never have got past the mockery stage – an exercise in the studied impotence of our political elites.