Is Carbon Capture the new Fusion? 

I’ve just finished reading Charles Seife’s “Sun in a Bottle” – an account of the first fifty years of nuclear fusion research.  It is a fascinating story, not least for the optimism that has driven research into fusion reactors.  At the start of that development, we were repeatedly told that fusion power might appear at five years notice, giving us energy that was “too cheap to meter”.  That last claim was made in 1954.  It was a great vision, which may yet come true, although I doubt that the “too cheap to meter” will ever happen, as there’s a lot of infrastructure needed to deliver electricity.  However, the prospect of fusion as our major source of electricity is still largely a dream. 

What struck me about much of the language used to promote the fusion dream over the last seventy years is that it is almost identical to the promises being used to sell the latest miracle technology – Carbon Capture and Storage.  Carbon Capture and Storage is being promoted as the means of saving the world from climate change with a similar evangelical zeal to the way that fusion was in the 1950s.  You could take any article or press release about either, swap the phrase “Nuclear Fusion” for “Carbon Capture”, or vice versa, and it would feel just as convincing.   Sadly, Carbon Capture’s imminent arrival is just as tenuous as that of nuclear fusion.  Its credibility is being held together by a mesh of minor achievements, suggesting that small academic advances will somehow scale into vast plants which will save us from climate change.  The same optimistic requests of “just a few more year’s work” and “just a few more hundred billions of investment” are blinding our technically-illiterate politicians into believing that the promise is real, without noticing that they are being fed the same story.  In the UK, Ed Miliband sees it as the saviour of his net zero plans.  The bad news is that he thinks he can make it happen by adding the billions of pounds of development costs to future domestic energy bills.

It’s important to understand why Ed Miliband and the rest of the UK political establishment is so desperate to be hoodwinked by the Carbon Capture story.  It all comes down to a promise that a previous Prime Minister made when she was trying to secure some sort of legacy for herself.  Just before stepping down from her premiership, Teresa May committed the UK to becoming fully net zero by 2050.  Neither she, nor any other MP had any idea of how to achieve that.  All of them, with the noble and notable exception of Labour’s Graham Stringer (one of the few MPs with a science background), happily bleated yes, despite a complete lack of evidence, and committed the UK to an impossible target.

Over the next few years, it has become clear what the implications of that vote were.  As they’ve sunk in, along with the impracticality of meeting them, a confusion of Civil Service weasels has been busy rewording the UK’s commitment to a binding net zero future, or at least redirecting the responsibility.  The current weasel words are basically:

• The UK will close down any major CO₂ emitting industries, such as steel production, and then buy the commodities we need from other countries, which emit more CO₂ than we did to produce them.  But we won’t count that as our CO₂ emission.
• The Government will prevaricate about when the production of petrol vehicles will end in the UK, causing uncertainty, the loss of manufacturing investment and a reduction in CO₂ emissions.
• Home owners will be encouraged to reduce gas consumption by switching domestic heating to heat pumps at their own expense, even though the Government’s own research shows they won’t work for around half of UK homes.
• Farmers will be incentivised to stop growing crops in favour of set-aside and solar farms.  Instead, we’ll import food from other countries.
• We won’t count the CO₂ emissions from making anything we purchase from another country as part of our CO₂ emissions, even though we should.
• We won’t count any CO₂ emissions from air travel or sea freight, as that’s too difficult.
• We will move electricity generation to renewables, without a storage strategy, and claim that strategy will make energy cheaper.  And,
• The Government will maintain a promise to build another 1.5 million new homes.

All of these run the risk of killing growth, lowering GDP and turning the UK into a third world economy.  That doesn’t seem to bother Mr Miliband.  What does bother him are the last two points above, as he needs to make cement to build houses, as well as keeping the lights on.  That means gas furnaces to make cement and gas generators to balance electricity demand.  Both of which produce CO₂, which means his net zero target becomes a not zero one.

The Carbon Capture and Storage industry has been quick to seize the opportunity, selling their technology as the answer.  The basics of the technology are that the industrial process which it is used to clean up is augmented by a separation stage which isolates the CO₂ that is generated from the other by-product gases.  The CO₂ is then compressed and transferred to long term storage, generally deep, underground repositories, which are subsequently sealed.  The CO₂ may be used before it’s stored, typically to force more oil out of partially-depleted wells, in which case a “U” is added to the initialism, turning it into CCUS – Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage.

CCUS was first proposed in the 1980s, gaining momentum in the 2000s as its proponents recognised the opportunity to market it as the new Saviour on the block.  Only around a third of the plants proposed since then have been built, of which only 2% have performed to specification.  Currently, fewer than 50 plants are operating worldwide, capturing around 0.1% of the total global carbon dioxide emissions. 

There is plenty of debate about its potential contribution to achieving net zero.  Carbon Capture requires significant amounts of energy to work.  Whilst it will capture more CO₂ than will be produced by the excess power generation needed to run it, the increased usage of gas, especially if it is transported around the world as Liquified Natural Gas, may result in raised methane leakage which counterbalances the improvement resulting from the captured CO₂.  It is still early days for industrial scale Carbon Capture and the jury is still out.  Engineering advances will make it more effective and more viable, but it is currently barely beyond the early prototype stage.  Like the original fusion story, it is promising large scale deployment in five years, but it’s more likely to need fifty.

Behind the debate around Carbon Capture and Storage is the underlying fact that the UK’s power generation will continue to rely on gas fired power stations for at least the next two decades.  Renewables are great when the wind blows and the sun shines.  But even with offshore wind, there are times when renewable generation dips and we need to bring in backup.  In time, that will be storage (probably batteries) and nuclear, but both will take many years to build in sufficient quantity.  Over the next twenty years the backup will mostly be provided by interconnect (buying electricity from other countries, assuming they have surplus) or building new gas generating plant.  Gas power stations are the only solution that we can deploy quickly.  Which means that they must be built if we don’t want the lights to go off.  We’re also going to have to make a lot more cement if we’re going to build all of those new houses.

If we accept building new homes and keeping the lights on are national priorities, we could do both without carbon capture and storage.  Most of the rest of the world is doing exactly that, eschewing full scale carbon storage, at least until it’s proven and its cost drops.  Ed Miliband is taking a different route.  He is a man of targets, who believes that targets must be met, whatever the consequences.  So, having lost an empire, the UK Government is now setting Net Zero up for a Pyrrhic victory of technical illiteracy over common sense.  To which goal, the UK Government has committed to spend £22 billion to fund the first prototype CCUS plants, 

The commercial consequences of this approach are finally beginning to dawn.  At the end of January, sixteen members of the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee sat down to face the assembled mandarins of the Climate Change committees, asking whether this was value for money.  They were concerned that this was “unproven” green technology and that three quarters of the cost would be added as a surcharge to energy bills.  Their chair was concerned that “this policy is going to have a very significant effect on consumers’ and industry’s electricity bills”.  He was correct.  The UK already has some of the highest energy costs in the world, which is a major disincentive for industry and growth.  A significant portion of those costs is Government supplements, added to support green initiatives such as offshore wind, smart meters and now, carbon capture.  None have given us a more robust energy network, but they have given us more expensive energy.

Ed Miliband responded in a subsequent interview, acknowledging that the technology was novel but claiming it was vital for tackling climate change.  “CCS is an innovative technology in terms of being used at scale,” he said, “but all the expert advice – UK Climate Change Committee and others – say if we don’t do this we are never going to cut global emissions,” adding that “he was “100% committed” to the government’s climate goals”.

There is something rather noble about Ed Miliband’s approach.  It’s like a hero from some “Boy’s Own” comic going out to explore the arctic wearing a stout pair of boots and his rugby shorts.  He has no plan B, largely because he doesn’t understand his Plan A.  Getting to Net Zero is a global problem and the first country to achieve it won’t get any plaudits.  If Britain’s goal is to get there first, it will probably bankrupt itself, which will mean it has no money to adapt to whatever the climate throws at us.  It’s far more sensible to be a few years late, but with the resources to cope, ideally with effort having been prioritised into building a more robust grid, better flood and coastal defences and putting aside money to deal with other problems.  We need progress.  We will need new technologies.  We probably need to be more self-sufficient.  What we don’t need is a set of unattainable targets, when our only mitigation is a technological fairy story

To understand why the current optimism is so misplaced, the Government needs to look back at the original promises for nuclear fusion, made back in 1954, when a young, optimistic industry predicted that they could deliver a vision of plenty in just five years.  When that statement was made, around 97.5% of the world’s current population had not been born.  Despite hundreds of billions being poured into research on fusion reactors, the first commercial reactor capable of generating viable quantities of electricity is still a considerable way away, with no clear view of when it will arrive.  Fusion enthusiasm is growing again, as it has a new bandwagon to jump on, but nobody believes it will be here in anything like five years from now.  It’s doubtful that more than a handful of people who were alive when that initial announcement was made will be alive to see the first electricity delivered to the grid by a fusion plant.

The evolution of Carbon Capture from a good idea to widescale deployment is unlikely to be very different.  It shouldn’t be hampered by some of the radiation scares which have affected the progress of nuclear fusion, although even that’s not assured, as there have been some fairly horrendous losses of life from natural and industrial releases.  But that is par for the course with the global rollout of any new technology.

The important message is that the UK doesn’t have to place all of its bets on one horse, particularly when its choice of horse is looking so unwell.  It is vitally important to reduce carbon emissions, but not at any cost.  We should concentrate on what we know works and is cost effective at a national level, then act globally to address the more difficult issues, not gamble on them, or pursue them at the cost of national prosperity and growth, just to try and look good. 

Both carbon capture and nuclear fusion, once they can be made to work, should both be good things.  But until they do work they are just distractions to the more important job of getting the UK to work.  Ed’s brother David just lost his job at Meta for trying to make it woke.  Maybe it’s time to get rid of Ed for attempting to make Britain broke.