The Reckless Pursuit of Industrial Carbon Capture and Storage Clusters

Author: Alicia Hull

When it is generally agreed that we need to cut carbon emissions and our dependency on fossil fuels as soon as possible, and when the government claims it is so short of money it has had to cut investment in environmental schemes to capture (sequester) carbon naturally, it has chosen to commit taxpayers to fund Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), a long term, untested industrial process which inevitably increases carbon emissions and locks us into using fossil fuels for decades. 

They have promised £21.7 billion over 25 years, plus an extra £9.4 billion this year and another £34 billion to cover risks. So far, little has been paid, so their policy means the double blow of huge expense and increasing climate change.

Under the misleading title of ‘carbon capture and storage’, the government is building new gas-powered fuel stations and ‘blue hydrogen’ plants in ‘clusters’ of hubs and pipelines joining several sources to storage facilities. The embedded carbon in building these hubs before any capture can occur will, by itself, increase carbon levels.

The government claims that economies of scale will make industrial carbon capture affordable to enable net zero. A dubious claim for an untried process. Estimates from ‘Teesside Endurance sub-sea CO2 Storage’ question the possibility of providing enough safe storage for industrial production. Using renewable energy in any industrial carbon capture and storage would be much safer and cheaper.

The imported dirty gas used in this scheme will increase our carbon footprint even more. As North Sea reserves are nearly exhausted, imports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) from the USA will be needed. LNG has a carbon footprint higher than coal, mostly from leaks of methane during production and transport. Methane is 84 times more harmful than CO₂ over 20 years. About 2/3 of the leaks will occur at the production site and on the journey across the USA to the UK, and are not included in the government’s figures. They only count emissions within the UK, so they vastly underestimate the total carbon cost. This is likely to get worse as President Trump is deregulating control of methane emissions. While another potential source from Qatar also has a high carbon footprint.

This ruling is not restricted to CCS. It applies to all products and journeys, which means that the carbon footprint we cause is vastly underestimated, especially as most production has been outsourced and long-haul flights are increasing.

The claim that the UK has reduced its carbon footprint over the last few decades, so frequently made by ministers, relies on this falsehood.

The government’s failure to assess the full cost and viability of its CCS plans was exposed by Dr Andrew Boswell, a scientist, working with Scrap Carbon Capture (ScrapCC) in a crowd-funded attempt to get a Judicial Review. 

Since 2023, ministers have had a legal duty to give ‘due regard’ to the Environmental Principles Policy Statement (EPPS) when making policy. Its principles include: integration into policies, preventing harm, tackling pollution at source, the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle. But in the government’s Industrial Strategy in 2025, EPPS assessments were minimal, ‘light touch’. Dr Boswell achieved a first win. The government was forced to admit that its Environmental Principles Policy Statement (EPPS) assessment for CCS was hugely deficient and therefore probably illegal. They had to review their policy decision. But even after the review assessments have remained inadequate, as the Government delayed an EPPS assessment on CCS. 

This was not Dr Boswell’s first campaign. He had already taken the government to court about its inadequate assessment of the environmental damage in road schemes in a campaign to ‘stop road schemes that destroy the countryside’. His early campaign, ‘Stop the Wensum link’, persuaded Norfolk County Council to drop its support for the road across wonderful countryside and declare a rights of the river motion for the River Wensum.

Clearly, citizens have proved responsible and effective in researching the true costs and benefits of different policies, while governments have consistently failed to do so and instead blindly pursued modern, untested or dangerous technologies favoured by corporations. In view of these cases, the many ‘time bombs’ new technologies have already caused, and the recent history of lies to protect profits, we must ask how their assessment of other flagship industries, such as nuclear power, nuclear weapons, GM and AI, stands up as well as the assumptions and assessments made in many of their social policies.

Thousands of people across the world, including Diem25 (Democracy in Europe Movement) and Citizen Network here, are convinced that the public needs to be at the centre of policy-making. The capitalist rules of banking and trade and the top-down neoliberal policies of privatisation are the root cause of both environmental destruction and social distress, which drive us to disaster. 

Thousands have taken responsibility, using widespread conversations to develop decentralised policies from the bottom up in a participatory democracy to restore control to the people for the huge transition needed to survive in today’s unstable world. Everything about our lifestyles needs to change, and only the public has the power or right to decide how to do this in the fairest possible way. Everyone can join and support this process. Indeed, it is all up to us now! Membership of Citizen Network, and use of its library, is free.

The publisher is Citizen Network. The Reckless Pursuit of Industrial Carbon Capture © Alicia Hull 2026.