Carbon capture and storage was never going to happen

Today's newspapers are reporting that the future of the Acorn carbon capture and storage project is in doubt. Common Weal would disagree with that assessment. We would argue that all that is in doubt is the illusion that there is going to be a carbon capture and storage facility in Scotland.

We are repeatedly on the record of arguing that we do not believe such a facility is ever likely to appear, that it would be many years late if it did and that it would be unlikely to work anyway. So why do we think this? There are countless reasons.

Let's start with the money. This project has been talked about for a decade and so far a few million has been spent on the sort of early consultancy work that absorbs money and delivers only plans. There are few projects which have bee talked about so much but invested in so little.

The budget allocated a future £200 million to this scheme. To put that in perspective, the amount that it is estimated that current 'plans' for CCS in Britain is currently ballooning out of control and has reached an estimated £408 billion. The UK could almost certainly decarbonise most of its economy for that cost.

Or lets look at an existing case. Built coming on for a decade ago, the Petra Nova CCS plant in Texas cost about $1 billion. Replicating that now would probably cost twice as much. The UK is notionally committing about ten per cent of likely project costs (which will spiral further) at some point in the future.

Is there really a business case that will return the other 90 per cent of this cost to an investor? If so, it would seem strange that the major partner is currently running away from this project.

There are other reasons we were fairly confident in our prediction. Because that $1 billion plant in Texas has been shuttered since 2020. It is a billion dollar white elephant that failed. This is not surprising because most carbon capture and storage facilities fail. Project after project after project has been abandoned because they didn't work.

This is happening again and again because the process itself is difficult and expensive. Carbon dioxide is a tiny molecule which is hard to capture successfully. Even successful schemes (which are almost all small scale) are doing well to capture about 70 per cent of emissions. That is getting towards the limit of technical feasibility.

But the problems just keep mounting. Many touted 'successes' are actually capture at the time of production (capturing leakage and carbon produced by for example oil rigs). That is little more than ten per cent of the carbon involved.

And in any case, no-one is really sure if you can actually capture carbon dioxide in the long term. Again, it is a very small molecule and so can leak easily. Trying to store it long term in geological structures which contained heavy oil may just mean it returns to the atmosphere over a number of years or decades.

So what kind of carbon would the Acorn plant capture? This is crucial. You cannot capture the main emitters of carbon in Scotland because they are dispersed. Primary emitters including household heating, transport and agriculture. None of these can be captured from Peterhead.

That means some new activity has to be invented which creates carbon dioxide which can be captured. The only purpose of building Acorn is to create 'blue hydrogen'. A new plant will use petrochemicals to create hydrogen by breaking off the carbon dioxide and this will be captured and stored (in theory).

But there is no established market for that much hydrogen at that cost and its not entirely clear there will be. The chances of this becoming a very costly white elephant is very high indeed. There is almost certainly no business case. Which is almost certainly why the investors are walking away.

So what is this all really about? It is perhaps the single most cynical piece of politics currently practiced in Britain. The purpose of CCS is for politicians to pretend that we can keep pumping oil and gas forever without consequence because we'll magically make the problems go away.

It is dishonest and everyone knows this is absolutely not the future of global energy. This litany of reasons is why we have never at any point believed this project was real, or at least never believed it would be delivered on anything like the basis which was being promised. We have always believed that this is nothing more than a trick to launder the reputation of oil and gas.

At your expense.