Energy Transition Commentary 13
Response to article by George Monbiot, Guardian, 8 July 2026
The great carbon capture con: behold the wasted millions Burnham could claw back
The above Guardian article by George Monbiot on 8 July claims that the UK’s government investment in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is not needed, a con trick and will cost the public purse over ten times more than the current investment of £21.7bn. It is based largely on unconfirmed speculation regarding the finance numbers and misunderstanding of realistic routes to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050, both in the UK and globally. We have already posted a response to this on our Linkedin site, (26) Towards Net Zero Imperial | Groups | LinkedIn ; this commentary gives a fuller account.
We can perhaps all (including Mr Monbiot) agree that the destination we are aiming for is a country (and a world) with sufficient low-carbon electricity (renewables, nuclear) to meet the needs of everything we wish to decarbonise and can be electrified, sufficient grid-scale energy storage so that we have dispatchable power available to cope with daily and seasonal variations when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow, a much expanded electricity grid with the capacity to bring all the green electrons onshore and distribute them to all parts of the UK that need them and industrial manufacturing processes that use renewable (non-fossil fuel) feedstocks, powered by renewable electricity or heat and which do not generate any greenhouse gases as by-products (as cement manufacture does now by releasing CO2 through calcining calcium carbonate to produce lime, a key component of cement clinker).
So with this destination in mind, exactly what aspects of installing CCS does Monbiot object to? His arguments imply that we should convert to a fully renewables-based economy almost immediately and that by building more and more renewable power plants we can simply throw fossil fuels out of the window. In focusing his argument on power, he fails to take into account that fossil fuels have not only been used to generate electricity, but are also used to make the chemical products and materials that underpin our modern materials world. Converting all this key manufacturing to use alternative renewable feedstocks, like biomass and waste materials, to power them by electricity and waste heat rather than steam from gas-fired boilers and to produce new decarbonised processes to produce key construction materials (such as cement and steel) made from mineral ores, using highly-energy intensive processes, will not happen overnight, great as current development work is in trying to achieve these goals as soon as possible. This will be a transition that will take many decades. The same is true for the large-scale energy storage and power grid expansions required to remove the need for baseload dispatchable power (e.g. gas fired or nuclear) to meet the multi-day and seasonal shortfalls of wind and sun generation; this will all take several decades to achieve, with estimates of upfront capital costs ranging from £2-7 trillion. To achieve this operationally and financially is an enormous challenge; the cost to the tax payer is estimated to be about £4bn annually, about 0.2% of GDP; most of the heavy lifting will draw on private investment.
So the reason that CCS is in the UK government’s energy and net-zero plans is not to pander to the lobbying of the fossil fuel industry or to prolong unnecessarily the production and use of oil and gas and ‘provide a publicly-funded reason for it to stay in business’. It is because, unless we are prepared for blackouts, for the unavailability of all the materials, products and furnishings upon which our current facilities, lifestyle and quality of life depend and for the inability to create the built environment without decarbonised building materials, then we have no alternative but to continue to use fossil fuels as part of this decadal transition to net-zero. Their continued use (albeit to an increasingly lower extent, until all the above processes and systems are in place, hopefully by the middle of this century or soon thereafter) makes it essential that we implement CCS as a platform technology to decarbonise manufacturing processes, any baseload CO2 generating power plants (such as those using gas or waste) and to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (Greenhouse Gas Removal GGR) to give the negative emissions that will be essential to compensate for the very difficult-to-decarbonise sectors such as air and marine transport, which will probably continue to emit CO2 even after we have all our domestic decarbonisation infrastructure is in place. This is why all realistic integrated assessment models show, and successive expert reports from the IPPC, the UK CCC and the IEA continue to emphasise, that CCS is essential to reaching the UK, and the world’s, climate targets.
Since we cannot magically transition to the net-zero endgame, CCS is therefore an essential technology to enable us to get there as near on-schedule as we can and at lowest cost. Government upfront investment of £20.7bn may seem a large cost, but it is spread over 25 years and is essential to reduce risks and encourage private investment, get projects moving, reduce costs and build the market. It is expected that this will unlock over £25bn of private investment even by 2030. The £264bn future costs figure in Monbiot’s article does not come from government, the stakeholders constructing the UK CCS Clusters or any independent body; it is a campaigner reconstruction built by aggregating figures pulled from separate CCC spreadsheets rather than a single published lifetime cost model. It is a flat undiscounted 25 year cumulative capital plus operating costs figure, so whatever the real on-going cost it is bound to be much more than the initial construction-only headline number and will largely or completely be met by private investment anyway.
In considering the costs to the UK tax payer, Monbiot fails to factor in the community costs of failing to introduce CCS. UK manufacturing has declined in a major way over the past four decades and if our solution to industrial carbon emissions is to close down the remaining manufacturing heartlands, which continue to produce chemicals, plastics, medical and personal products, for example, as well as much needed low-carbon fuels such as hydrogen and the emerging sustainable aviation fuels, then job losses and the consequent social costs and community deprivation will be enormous. By contrast, using CCS to decarbonise manufacturing processes and co-located baseload gas power and hydrogen manufacturing plants, will both preserve existing jobs for several generations and create thousands of new jobs in a growing new CCS industry (and its supply chains), which will need to be as big as the oil and gas industry it is replacing in order to be able to decarbonise at the required capacity and rate.
Monbiot claims that ‘new CCS plants will mean massively more gas use than the UK would otherwise have required’. This is not the case; they will simply enable us to use the gas we would need to use anyway (to enable the lights to stay on and to continue to manufacture essential products and materials) but to do so without releasing CO2 to the atmosphere – creating decarbonised processes and products. If we need gas, our first priority should be to use the plentiful supplies available in our own North Sea for decades to come. Despite hyperbole in the sources Monbiot cites that the North Sea gas fields will be mostly depleted by 2030, there is still as much extractable hydrocarbon remaining as we have already removed. Instead, the UK government refuses to allow new production licenses to be granted, even for the Rosebank and Jackdaw fields approved in 2022-23 but held up by NGO legal challenges, preferring instead to import gas from Norway, which extracts it from the same North Sea, resulting in higher costs and carbon footprint and contributing to the demise of oil and gas jobs in the UK. The ethics of doing this is highly questionable, combining the hypocrisy of not feeling responsible for extracting the gas we use with causing the catastrophic social consequences of large lay-offs and decreasing investment in Aberdeen and other areas highly dependent for employment and local wealth on oil and gas. High windfall taxes have undoubtedly contributed to this decline whereas removing these and encouraging more extraction licenses to meet our gas requirements, that are an agreed part of our energy transition plan, would increase normal oil and gas tax revenues and enhance our energy security, as well as ensuring that the UK transition is socially just.
Monbiot suggests that we will need more imports of liquified natural gas (LNG) from the US and Middle East, which may well happen but caused by the Government’s North Sea extraction policy rather than the implementation of CCS. He says that we ‘now know’ that LNG has higher emissions than coal. Such a claim rests almost entirely on the lifecycle work of Robert Howarth (Cornell), which uses a methane leak-rate assumption more than an order of magnitude more than the EPA/DOE baseline of ~0.7%. In fact he DOE's 2019 lifecycle analysis put US LNG exported to Europe anywhere from ~56% lower to ~1% higher in emissions than local coal, depending on route and time horizon, and a peer-reviewed 2015 Carnegie Mellon study found LNG roughly 32% lower than coal for power generation. Imported LNG undoubtedly has a higher carbon footprint than pipeline gas, which emphasises the value of using as much domestic supply as possible whilst it is still needed.
A major part of Monbiot’s argument that CCS is not needed is that ‘battery (storage) technology is evolving , enabling a balanced and reliable electricity supply.’ This is an assertion which has not been demonstrated. Grid-scale Li-ion storage is a 1-4 hour duration technology; it would be excellent for frequency response and daily peak-shaving, but it does not address multi-day or seasonal shortfalls - a UK ‘dunkelflaute’ can run for several days with minimal wind and solar output across the whole system. Covering that gap needs either long-duration storage (hydrogen, compressed air, pumped hydro, all of which are early-stage or geographically constrained at UK scale) or sufficient dispatchable low-carbon generation (e,g, nuclear), plus enough system inertia to keep the frequency stable without synchronous thermal plant. None of this is resolved in either direction yet, and the assertion that "batteries can do it" glosses over a genuinely open systems engineering question.
However, George Monbiot’s article does make some fair points regarding accountability of use of public funds and has an underlying implication that CCS costs are too high with a concern that too much of this may be met from the public purse. A funding model based on some government subsidy linked to much greater private investment driven by the market is fragile, unless the market grows quickly. If CCS is too expensive to move rapidly to the commercial scale using affordable subsidies, then it should be made mandatory. One way to do this is to require the oil and gas producers to pay for the capture and safe disposal of the CO2 that is released in their subsequent use and conversion – the ‘polluter pays’ principle. This could be made a condition of any future licenses issued in the North Sea, at a stroke address the legal challenges over concerns about downstream scope 3 emissions and provide upfront funding for the creation and expansion of a UK CCS system and industry. This would ensure that by continuing to use fossil fuels for as long as the net-zero plan demands, and technology development rates and social justice issues require, we do so without contributing to global warming. This concept of Carbon Takeback Obligations, promoted inter alia by Myles Allen at Oxford and Stuart Haszeldine at Edinburgh, is an compelling way of reducing uncertainty over future CCS funding and removing concerns that growing the industry will continue to draw in a major way on the public purse. It is a simple way of recognising that the real cost of fossil fuels is the lifting (production) cost enhanced by the cost of removing the embedded CO2.
None of this means the UK CCS programme is beyond criticism - cost transparency, discounting methodology and contract risk-allocation all deserve real scrutiny. However, there is a difference between "this programme needs tight scrutiny" and "this is categorically a con". The solution to greater scrutiny and the need for more robust funding to minimise the public purse requirement is not to argue that CCS should not be pursued – because the cost and social consequences of abandoning CCS would far exceed any envisaged public investment - but to find ways to address these issues.
Professor Martin Blunt, Professor of Flow in Porous Media
Professor Paul Fennell, Professor of Clean Energy
Professor Niall Mac Dowell, Professor of Energy Systems Engineering
Professor Geoffrey Maitland, Professor of Energy Engineering
Professor Ann Muggeridge, Professor of Subsurface Physics
Professor Ronny Pini, Professor of Multiphase Systems
Professor Martin Trusler, Professor of Thermophysics
Imperial College London, Transition to Net Zero Group