New CCS plants will increase gas use, leading to more imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
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Methane leakage along the LNG chain makes its emissions higher than coal, with two-thirds of its greenhouse impact occurring before arrival in the UK.
If the goal were to cut emissions, the UK would push fossil fuel use in electricity to zero and scale up renewables and battery storage.
Instead, the CCS programme ramps up both emissions and costs.
Influence of Fossil Fuel Lobbying
The programme appears to result from massive lobbying by fossil fuel companies. In 2023, Equinor, BP, and ExxonMobil attended 24 meetings with ministers to discuss CCS.
For them, CCS is the only way to keep burning gas.
The scientific credibility of CCS was shaped by BP.
Investigative work by ProPublica and Drilled found that BP financed and helped steer the influential “Wedges” climate paper in 2004, which presented CCS as “already deployed at an industrial scale” when it was barely tested.
Since then, CCS has a record of failures.
In the UK, three attempts—the 2005 Peterhead plan, a 2011 demonstration project, and a 2012 funding competition—were abandoned due to cost escalation and infeasibility.
The public accounts committee notes the government is taking a high-risk approach by backing unproven technologies with large amounts of taxpayer and consumer funding.
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The lead operator of the first CCS cluster is BP, completing a cycle of appeasing the fossil fuel industry.
