CLIMATE campaigners have criticised the Scottish Government’s commitment to a carbon capture project in the north east and claimed the technology has largely failed to deliver on its promises.
On Monday, First Minister John Swinney visited the Acorn project in St Fergus, Aberdeenshire and announced £2 million of fresh funding for the scheme.
The project is part of the Scottish Cluster, which brings together fossil fuel companies Shell and Harbour Energy with carbon capture company Storegga, oil and gas infrastructure owner North Sea Midstream Partners, and gas network operator National Gas.
The project proposes capturing up to 200,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from industries and energy infrastructure in the region and storing the emissions permanently under depleted oil and gas fields in the North Sea.
The new funding is set to go towards exploring how emissions from the central belt could be transported to the north east for storage.
Yet climate campaigners said that the technology – which seeks to trap and store carbon produced by fossil fuels in order to prevent in escaping into the atmosphere and contributing to climate change – directs money away from bolstering renewable energy infrastructure and electrifying transport systems.
One of Scotland’s leading climate change campaigners and the former director of WWF Scotland, Richard Dixon, told The National that if the technology was truly a solution then oil companies wouldn’t be relying on government funding to finance the project.
“Despite a billion pounds of public money being on offer in two previous government competitions, carbon capture has completely failed to get started in the UK”, he said.
“There are few plants around the world, most are failing to deliver on their promises and many are linked to boosting oil production, so they actually make climate change worse.
“Carbon capture is an eye-wateringly expensive way to pretend we can keep burning fossil fuels in the future.
“The most obvious sign of this deception is that, if carbon capture is the great solution they claim, the oil companies would be using their huge windfall profits to make it happen, instead of expecting government handouts.
“Public money should be going into boosting renewable energy and energy efficiency, and electrifying transport and building heating.
“Every pound invested in carbon capture is a pound lost to the cheaper, proven and simpler solutions we actually need.
"Worse still, the promise of carbon capture at Acorn will help legitimise the plans for a new gas-fired power station at Peterhead, even if Acorn never actually gets going at scale.
“The last thing any country serious about climate change needs is a new gas-fired power station.”
Caroline Rance, an energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, questioned why public money was going to fossil fuel companies given the scale of their profits in recent years.
“The Acorn carbon capture terminal does not exist and there hasn’t even been a planning application submitted to build it,” she said.
“However, with these fawning statements of support, the First Minister is in danger of making a mockery of the Scottish Government conducting a fair assessment of future planning applications.
“Vital public services are crying out for funding yet John Swinney has decided to give millions of pounds to a pet project of Shell, who made £50 billion profit in the last two years.
“The public must be starting to think the Scottish Government has been captured by the fossil fuel industry with hundreds of cosy meetings, huge handouts and the rolling back of positions on ending oil and gas.
“The Acorn Project is a pipe dream of polluters that will never live up to its hype."
Rance echoed Dixon's call for the money to be spent elsewhere.
“Why are Ministers banking on this technology, and ploughing on with fossil fuel infrastructure, when they are not even sure if it will work?
"The failure of carbon capture to materialise created a huge gap in efforts to meet Scotland’s 2030 climate targets and yet Ministers want to repeat this mistake.”
“If this pipeline is so critical, then why are the likes of Shell, Ineos and other wealthly polluters not paying the relatively modest £2million for this study, when they will be the main beneficiaries of the Acorn project?”
“The purpose of CCS is to greenwash plans to extend the life of burning oil and gas.
"Carbon capture has already had billions of pounds and decades of work to prove itself and it has failed on its promises everywhere it has been tried."
The Acorn project previously made headlines after it was snubbed by the UK Government's first round of levelling up funding.
However, former prime minister Rishi Sunak later backed the project with funding.
It has since been echoed with support for Labour, which is set to fund carbon capture through its National Wealth Fund.
Tessa Khan, the executive director of climate campaign group Uplift, said the funding exemplified the Scottish Government's approach to transforming the energy sector.
"This is another example of the Scottish government’s piecemeal approach to the energy transition," she said.
"Frittering a couple of million here and there on pet projects of the oil and gas industry is not the level of ambition Scottish workers need to see.
"Instead of handing what is essentially pocket money to the profiteering oil giants, the Scottish government needs to sit down with the Westminster government, unions, workers and affected communities and come up with a detailed and properly funded long-term plan to ensure that the transition to clean energy is in the public interest and not just benefiting the oil and gas industry."
A report into the global use of the technology published by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis in 2022 examined 13 projects around the world, which at the time made up around 55% of those in operation.
Seven of the projects underperformed, two failed and one was mothballed, meaning that only three delivered the promised results in capturing carbon.
However, it also stated that most carbon capture projects used the recaptured gas to pump into dwindling oil fields in order to extract the remaining fossil fuels.
