The Carbon Capture Paradox

Carbon capture and storage separates carbon dioxide from other gases, compresses it, and pipes it to a geological formation where it is intended to stay permanently.

Each step has an energy cost. Capturing the gas takes power; compressing and transporting it takes more. The net saving in emissions is therefore always less than the amount captured, and how much less depends on the energy source used. A capture project powered by unabated gas can save far less than its headline figure suggests.

The storage side is better established than the capture side. Depleted gas fields and saline aquifers under the North Sea have held gas and brine for millions of years, and the geology is well understood. Monitoring obligations extend over decades.

The harder questions are about system effects. A pipeline network built for a cluster must be sized for future customers as well as current ones, which means public money pays for capacity others will use. And because carbon capture is expensive per tonne, it competes for the same budget as insulation, heat pumps and renewable generation, which in most studies deliver more abatement for the same money.

Then there is the political effect. A plant with a capture system has a future, and that future is created by policy. Whether it also delays the retirement of the plant, or the plant's replacement by something cleaner, is a question the subsidy does not answer.

For the workers in these industries, the argument is personal and immediate.

A steelworks in Port Talbot or a chemicals plant on Teesside is not only an employer. It supports suppliers, apprenticeships, a football club, a high street. Closure costs are paid in a town, not on a balance sheet.

That is why carbon capture has political support in the places where it is being built. It offers continuity: the same site, the same workforce, a different pipe. Workers who have watched plants close elsewhere are understandably reluctant to treat a promised technology as a threat.

The residents along the pipeline routes have a different experience. Construction brings years of works, traffic and compensation negotiations. Some landowners object; others accept. Risk perception matters here: pipelines carrying carbon dioxide behave differently from gas pipelines, because a leak of dense carbon dioxide can pool in low ground and is hazardous in a way that is not intuitive.

And there is the question that does not go away. If the plants keep running because the subsidy keeps them running, the community's transition has been postponed, not resolved, and the next closure will arrive with less warning.

The contributor's concern, which prompted this entry, is whether the policy is protecting jobs or protecting emissions. That is a question the published record can partly answer.

Carbon capture is a technology that people judge as an idea rather than as an engineering system, and that changes everything about how it is received.

Research on policy support finds that technologies associated with continuing fossil fuel use attract suspicion even when their numbers are good. The objection is not usually about the efficiency of an amine solvent. It is about what the technology appears to promise: that nothing has to change.

For the communities hosting it, the same fact reads differently. Continuity is the point. A promise that the plant stays open is not a moral compromise; it is next year's wages and a viable town. Both groups are reasoning correctly from the information they have.

There is also a trust problem specific to promises about the future. Voters have heard decades of projections about nuclear, hydrogen and clean coal. Each cycle leaves a residue, and the residue produces a bias towards expecting failure. This is not unreasonableness; it is learning from experience.

And there is a psychological asymmetry in how risk is weighed: a subsidised technology that might not work receives more scrutiny than an existing risk that certainly does harm, because the first is new and the second has become background.

None of these patterns tells us whether the policy is sound. They explain why the public argument is louder than the technical one.

Three claims are in tension.

The first is climate. Money spent on capture could abate more carbon elsewhere. If it does not, the people who pay the cost of a slower transition are those most exposed to climate change, at home and abroad, who have no say in the decision.

The second is employment. A just transition is supposed to protect workers, and a policy that keeps a plant running does protect them — for as long as the subsidy lasts. The risk is that it converts a transition into a deferral, and the deferral into an eventual closure for which no one has prepared.

The third is public money. Twenty billion pounds is committed to a pathway before a rigorous comparison with alternatives has been published. The people who will pay that are taxpayers, including those in regions that received nothing.

There is a procedural dimension. Where the pipeline runs, consent is decided nationally and disruption is local. Where the plant sits, the emissions benefit is national and the residual risk is local. Neither group is asked to accept the arrangement; both are asked to live with it.

And there is an intergenerational dimension that is unusual. Storage must be monitored for decades after the last plant closes, and the liability falls to the public. That is a promise made now by people who will not be present to keep it.

The framework is genuinely thorough. A statutory climate duty sets the target, a licensing regime governs storage, environmental permits govern emissions, planning governs construction and contract law governs the money.

Each instrument has an owner: the Climate Change Committee advises, the storage regulator licenses, the environmental regulators permit, the planning inspectorate examines and the energy ministry pays.

What no instrument does is test the sum. That a storage site is well licensed says nothing about whether the plant above it cut emissions by the amount claimed. That a carbon budget is met nationally says nothing about whether it was met at the lowest cost. That a milestone was hit says nothing about whether the alternative use of the money would have done better.

The reforms that would close the gap are administrative rather than technical: require every subsidised capture project to publish its measured net removal, not its design figure; assess clusters cumulatively rather than project by project; and publish the comparison with alternative abatement before committing public money.

None of these has been done, and each would show quickly whether the policy is delivering what it promised.