George Monbiot rightly eviscerates the government’s foolish plan to waste nearly £22bn on the carbon capture and storage (CCS) venture (Labour’s carbon-capture scheme will be Starmer’s white elephant: a terrible mistake costing billions, 11 October). But he only hints at a worse aspect of the plan: that it is entirely unproven to work on the scale needed to be effective, as many studies have shown.
A study of the health and climate impacts of carbon capture, in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, found that only 10.8% of one such plant’s CO2-equivalent emissions and 10.5% of the CO2 removed from the air is captured over 20 years, and only 20 to 31% is captured over 100 years. In addition, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis finds that “CCS is an expensive and unproven technology that distracts from global decarbonisation efforts while allowing oil and gas industries to conduct business as usual.”
