The SNP’s U-turn on oil is already scrabbling to justify itself and is now dependent on circular reasoning over the Acorn carbon-capture scheme to push in favour of more grants for fossil fuel companies.
With the controversial Jackdaw scheme now approved and the even more controversial Rosebank scheme still in the balance, the SNP have been lobbying a new line that oil and gas windfall profit tax revenue should be ringfenced for Scotland, despite the party now opposing such taxes and calling for them to be dropped.
They are also unhappy that the Acorn carbon capture scheme did not receive any new grant funding in the UK budget despite schemes in England receiving such money.
The problem is that carbon capture schemes are even more of a money sink than they are a carbon sink. No scheme anywhere in the world has come close to proving its value as a means of preventing or repairing carbon pollution from fossil fuel extraction. Some have even ended up emitting more carbon than they stored.
The schemes also vastly underestimate the amount of storage required to prevent damaging emissions. If Acorn reaches its maximum design capacity (infrastructure projects like this rarely meet their maximum promises) then it probably doesn’t even have enough space to contain the combined pollution of Jackdaw and Rosebank’s lifetime emissions estimates – never mind all of the other pollution generated in Scotland across the same time period.
So the Government is now employing circular reasoning that we need Acorn’s carbon capture because we haven’t been funding zero-carbon transitions fast enough but also the fossil fuels we should open up in the future should be used to fund carbon capture schemes that won’t even fully compensate for the pollution caused by the emissions it fails to capture. The solution to the problem of lack of funding for carbon capture schemes simply cannot be to drill for more oil and gas.
All the while, the companies behind the extraction are posting record profits as the world pulls away from efforts to decarbonise and most certainly aren’t being asked to pay for the full costs of their pollution (estimated now to be the equivalent of around $1,800 per tonne of carbon emitted today and not removed before 2100).
The ironic thing is that even if Acorn were to work as intended, that it was a credible path to a net-zero future and that “net-zero” itself was a credible future, the SNP would still be on the wrong side of the argument on this. Arguing for Scotland to be the sole beneficiary of the revenue of oil and gas would surely mean that Scotland should also bear sole liability for the costs of both the pollution and of decommissioning the fields at end-of-life (again, this should be the responsibility of the companies themselves rather than the public purse). And the UK’s argument against grants to Acorn is, in truth, far more sound than the SNP’s own proposal.
The UK argues that instead of non-repayable grants, future public investment in Acorn should take the form of loans and equity stakes from which the public could derive a return. While Common Weal still fundamentally disagrees with investing in fossil fuels (for the avoidance of doubt – the costs of the pollution outweigh the economic benefit and any “return” cannot be paid for by the rest of the world in terms of climate damage), this is the argument that we have been making towards the Scottish Government in terms of investment in renewables. Rather than simply privatising everything then throwing public money at the companies in the name of “inwards investment”, Scotland should be taking active equity stakes via a public energy company.
That they have fallen behind the UK Government on this logic is a poor omen for Scottish economic and industrial strategy.