Climate Briefing
Jun 9, 2025
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
A. High Level Summary
A1. The Government, and their advisors the Climate Change Committee (CCC), present carbon capture as a way to clean up emissions from existing industry by retrofitting CCS to existing heavy industrial processes like cement manufacture, a relatively uncontentious area amongst scientists.
A2. But this is deeply misleading. The UK’s CCS plans are dominated by proposals, costed in the hundreds of billions, to build out new CCS-enabled fossil fuel infrastructure and to add CCS to the Drax wood-burning power station. This strategy will lock us into burning fossil fuels and wood for decades, and impede the clean energy transition.
A3. With the North Sea in decline, the extra gas for the new fossil projects - gas fired power stations with CCS and blue hydrogen plants - will come from Liquified Natural Gas (‘LNG’) imports. A recent landmark study shows that, due to the powerful climate heating impact of methane leaks along the LNG supply chain, only a third of greenhouse gas emissions occur at the point of use. So even if CCS works, it will do nothing about the two thirds of the carbon footprint arising elsewhere in the supply chain.
A4. The extension of CCS clusters beyond fossil fuels is limited by fewer industrial sites coming forward for CCS retrofit than planned—as well as sites not being sufficiently near to CCS clusters, and sub-sea CO2 storage caverns not being as expandable as initially hoped. The Government and their advisers must take all these issues into account and ensure that they have properly assessed the associated risks for industrial decarbonisation policies, and the impacts to the economy and to the climate.
A5. The Government will publish a new Climate plan this autumn informed by the CCC’s Seventh Carbon Budget—which recommends hundreds of billions for fossil fuel and biomass based CCS. High Court legal judgments against two previous climate plans identified the delivery of carbon reduction policies in the plans, including reliance on technologies which are unproven at scale such as CCS, had not been properly risk assessed.
A6. Following the Public Accounts Committee identifying CCS as a high risk to meeting carbon reduction targets, the Government must review CCS against the science, and remove fossil and bioenergy based CCS.
B. Background
B1. The UK plans for CCS in clusters, starting with the East Coast Cluster (Teesside) and HyNet (NW and North Wales) as Track 1, and with Viking (Humberside) and Acorn (Scotland) following as Track 2. Each cluster involves first building out new fossil fuel infrastructure: new gas power stations and ‘blue’ hydrogen plants. These are referred to as the cluster “anchor”.
B2. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) recently recommended a revised pathway for CCS based predominantly around new fossil fuel infrastructure and burning wood, including at Drax. It would require public and private investment of £350bn - £408bn by 2050, with up to £136bn for power stations burning gas, and £128bn for burning biomass with CCS (BECCS). These figures combine public and private costs, but, with the fossil fuel industry recently pulling back from investing in carbon capture, there is a strong risk that most of this cost will land on consumers and taxpayers.
B3. CCS subsidy schemes of £50bn have already been made with £23bn of Track 1 subsidies awarded for a new gas plant with CCS in Teesside, and two CO2 storage sites off Teesside and Liverpool Bay.
B4. Plans to capture emissions by retrofitting CCS to heavy industry like cement production plays a lesser role - and with less funding - with CCC recommending £22bn just 5 to 6% of the total.
B5. With the North Sea in decline, the extra natural gas demand for new fossil fuel plants, which anchor clusters, will be met entirely by imported LNG. A new high profile study shows that two thirds of the carbon footprint in the LNG supply chain, including ‘upstream’ methane leakage, cannot be captured. For the remaining third of emissions, companies claim CO2 capture rates which have never been commercially achieved.
B6. Around 95% of these ‘upstream’ emissions from the supply chain are offshored, and although they are the largest climate impact, the Government and CCC ignore them as they are not within UK territory.
B7. Similarly, at the point of burning, bioenergy emits more CO₂ per unit of electricity than coal, with Drax being the UK’s single largest CO₂ emitter: emissions also ignored by the Government and the CCC.
B8. For CCS clusters using both gas or biomass, the hidden and ignored emissions dominate the carbon footprint of the cluster, and this means that climate change is worsened especially during the early years, and even if the carbon capture technology works properly - a big “if”. Remember, CCS is a controversial technology, with a long track record of unmet promises.
B9. And expanding clusters beyond the first phase of fossil fuel based CCS to industrial CCS is currently hampered by CO2 storage facilities not being assured (see below), possible industrial decarbonisation sites not being close to clusters and sites not coming forward. For example, in the Teesside cluster, all projects selected for funding are either new gas power stations or fossil-based blue hydrogen.
B10. The Government and CCC have not risk assessed whether sub-sea carbon dioxide storage sites can be expanded rapidly enough to accomodate industrial decarbonisation in the later stages of the planned expansion of clusters. Geologists for the industry recently reported in a scientific paper that the required expansion of the Endurance storage field off Teesside is “highly uncertain”, severely limiting expansion of the Teesside cluster beyond its first fossil fuel based CCS phase.
B11. Independent scientists question the viability of CCS at scale.
B12. The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) recently warned: "There is a high risk that CCS will not deliver to the timescales or the level of carbon reductions needed and thus jeopardise the government’s ability to meet carbon reduction targets."
C. Key Points
C1. Retrofit. There may be a case for trying to cut emissions from existing hard-to-abate heavy industry by retrofitting CCS. But there are limitations to what CCS can achieve, and strong reasons to consider alternatives:
Electrification alternatives are increasingly available. For example, CCS is no longer recommended for steel. Many industrial processes may be more effectively decarbonised by electrification than with blue hydrogen made with LNG and CCS.
The case for retrofitting CCS in industry should be made outside of the current fossil fuels based cluster model. This model involves first developing new fossil fuel CCS ‘anchor’ projects, with plans for industrial emissions capture projects to be added later over decades. However, the anchor project does not need to be fossil fuel based, and these new fossil fuel projects are deeply problematic, as explained in the next point.
C2. New capacity. There is no valid case for building new CCS-enabled gas power stations and blue hydrogen plants, which will impede the transition to renewables. Reasons:
New capacity will increase demand for imported LNG from the US—now shown to be 33% worse than coal. And since, even with CCS, two thirds of the GHG footprint is unaddressed, the warming impact of this new fossil fuel infrastructure is likely to be similar to burning coal—worse if CCS fails to deliver.
There is a growing scientific consensus that 100% of our energy needs can be met by renewables without CCS—with Oxford University reporting that decarbonisation will save the world $12 trillion, and that the faster we go, the more we will save.
Operators of the blue hydrogen plants at the centre of the UK’s CCS plans want to inject hydrogen into the grid for home heating. But 54 studies now say that makes no sense. The industry may hope that building blue hydrogen capacity now will make it difficult for the Government to act on the evidence and rule out hydrogen for heating.
C3. Alternatives.
Our primary aim should be to stop burning fossil fuels. But, where there are residual emissions, restoring nature is a proven way to absorb carbon, and at a far lower cost—see Zero Hour’s Nature-rich UK report. Nature will also deliver an array of co-benefits like clean water, flood defences and rural jobs, with subsidies circulating within the UK economy rather than flowing offshore to the oil industry.
C4. The Subsidy Advice Unit—which scrutinises subsidy proposals—reports that Government has claimed an exemption for its CCS plans from a requirement to demonstrate that they will actually reduce UK emissions. The Government’s argument is that the subsidies are only for construction, not operation - suggesting, bizarrely, that there will therefore be no associated emissions.
C5. After the debacle of the sewage-dumping privatised water industry, is it wise to trust a for-profit industry to operate expensive-to-run CCS equipment reliably to capture an invisible gas, when no-one is looking? Particularly an industry with a well-evidenced track record of serial dishonesty, and weak regulators who shirk at taking enforcement action.
C6. Why should the public pay for the pollution caused by oil companies when they’re making record profits?
C7. Government pledges of billions for CCS funding and making the associated subsidy schemes have occured after very strong lobbying from the industry, also reported here. These decisions were not based on the best available evidence, nor recent science on upstream emissions. This is why an independent review of CCS is desperately needed, and commitments for CCS should be removed from the Climate plan.
D. Calls for Action
D1. The Government should commit to an independent review of both Government CCS policy and the advice from the CCC. If the Government and CCC genuinely consider that their CCS plans will reduce emissions, and provide the most cost effective way to do so, then why not submit them to independent review? This should cover:
the full lifecycle emissions across all the different CCS technologies in the Seventh Carbon budget report, and should take into account the overseas climate impacts of UK activities, including upstream LNG emissions and supply chain emissions and loss of forests associated with biomass energy.
determining whether UK CCS plans will reduce emissions overall without the current arbitrary transboundary partitioning of emissions, and investigating how the huge emissions penalty of fossil fuel based anchor projects in clusters can be addressed: for example, by powering CO2 transport and storage facilities from the grid
using methane’s climate impact over 20 years when converting to a CO₂ equivalent (82.5 times not 29.8 times), not the conventional 100 years (GWP100)—an arbitrary measure which does not realistically model methane’s powerful short-acting heating effect
costs, and whether decarbonisation can be achieved more cost effectively by other methods.
D2. We suggest that DESNZ meets with a group of independent experts to better understand the concerns raised by the science community - including some of those set out in a recent open letter.
D3. Remove CCS from the upcoming Climate Plan until the issues above have been resolved by a robust and thorough independent review.
E. Glossary
BECCS | Bioenergy with carbon capture and storage |
CCS | Carbon capture and storage |
CCC | Climate Change Committee |
DESNZ | Department for Energy Security & Net Zero |
GHG emissions | Greenhouse gas emissions which contribute to global warming |
LNG | Liquified natural gas imported by ship to the UK to make up the shortfall between North Sea natural gas production and UK gas demand |
‘Natural’ Gas | Fossil gas made up mostly of methane |
Carbon footprint (of product) | Total greenhouse gases caused by manufacturing the product, considering the whole life cycle including impacts up and down the supply chain. |