Last month the scandal broke that the Climate Change Committee (CCC) relied on just one year’s wind data when it advised MPs in 2019 that the U.K. would be able to rely on wind and solar power by 2050. This is despite U.K. annual wind varying by 39% from its maximum to its minimum during the period 2009-2022.
Now, it turns out that this error, major as it is, is a mere footnote compared with the much bigger problem of the mismatch between the CCC’s advice regarding carbon capture and storage and the Government’s stated intentions.
The U.K.’s ambition to achieve Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is heavily reliant on carbon capture and storage technology to remove all the CO2 that the country will still be producing.
According to the CCC report (see below), by 2050 the U.K. will need to be able to store 176 Mt of CO2 in order to achieve Net Zero emissions.
However, as things stand the Department of Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) states that by 2050 the U.K. will only have capacity to store 50 Mt of CO2, which is just over a quarter (28%) of what the CCC says is needed, falling 126 Mt short:
The U.K. is a first mover; we are aiming to support the establishment of two CCUS [carbon capture, usage and storage] clusters by the mid-2020s and a further two by 2030, through which we aim to capture 20-30 Mt CO2 per year. The long-term ambition is to reach 50 Mt CO2 annually by 2050. [emphasis added]
This massive shortfall guarantees that Net Zero cannot be achieved by 2050. Furthermore, it would in no way be possible to undertake the engineering and groundworks to build all that missing CO2 storage capacity by 2050, even if the U.K. had the money to fund it, which it does not.
There are of course all number of reasons why Net Zero is unachievable, unnecessary and unjustifiably costly. But the chasm between the amount of carbon capture the CCC says is needed to hit the target and the amount the Government actually thinks it will have available at the time means Net Zero is unachievable even on the Government’s own terms. It means that it doesn’t matter how much the Government cripples U.K. industry and drives it overseas, how successful it is in replacing dependable fossil fuels with intermittent renewables, it will never hit Net Zero by 2050 or anywhere close to it and has no credible plan to do so.
Do MPs and ministers realise this? The danger is that once they are alerted to the issue they will see it as a reason to redouble efforts to slash emissions and accelerate the building of carbon storage capacity. Of course, what they should do is add it to the ever-growing list of why Net Zero is a terrible idea that needs replacing with a proper energy policy that prioritises prosperity and security for the long term.
Stop Press: The Executive Chairman of Fortescue Metals, Andrew Forrest has said carbon capture is a “complete falsehood” that will never work. The Australian billionaire told the 50th anniversary meeting of the International Energy Agency: “We’re going to keep burning fossil fuels and somehow magically get rid of the carbon down into the ground where there is no proof that it will stay there, but heaps of proof that it fails. I say for policymakers everywhere, do not be the next idiot waiting for the old lie to be trotted out and say I believe in carbon sequestration. It has only failed for 75 years… It’s a complete falsehood.”
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
When the Chairman of the CCC is a complete moron like ‘Lord’ Deben, (John Selwyn Gummer), a major cock up is guaranteed. Being publicly filmed trying to feed his then four year old daughter a burger to prove the safety of British beef from BSE should have been the end of him 35 years ago.
She had more sense than her Dad. She refused on camera to take a bite from the hand trying to feed her [Daddy Selwyn].
And please please Chris Johnson stop being so inaccurate when writing articles.
This is nonsense:
“The U.K.’s ambition to achieve Net Zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 is heavily reliant on carbon capture and storage technology to remove all the CO2 that the country will still be producing“
Assuming it can ever be made to work, Carbon capture and storage will only remove 1% of the carbon dioxide the UK will be producing. The other 99% it will remove will be produced by China, India and the rest of the world.
So you and me and Uncle Tom Cobley and all will be paying handsomely in taxes to remove just 1% at the dictate of our idiot political masters and Woke Whitehall’s faceless bureaucrats serving the interests of external foreign commercial and industrial interests.
LOL – Green is for Go!!
Lord Deben is no idiot – he is being handsomely rewarded for his job and there are probably lots of sideline opportunities to earn even more income from the Net Zero industrial complex. . He probably knows full well Net Zero is a scam but a Lord has a certain standard of living to keep up to, bills to pay, wife’s health club expenses, holidays in the Caribbean, Penelope’s pony club, kids to school etc so why not milk it for it worth.
All establishment parties are signed up to Net Zero and thus it seems the real idiots are those who vote for them thus perpetuating the Net Zero scam whilst all the time contributing to Lord Deben’s puppet show and helping out with his domestic outgoings.
Of all the downright nonsense that gets discussed around Nut Zero carbon capture has to be the biggest ‘faeries at the bottom of the garden’ story of them all.
What process ensures that this dangerous Co2 is captured? What are the physical realities of this “industry?” Are there going to be massive suction pumps built and deployed?
What and how and where do we build the storage facilities? What happens when they are full? How will this dangerous Co2 be disposed of?
The sheer ridiculousness of this putative industry beggars belief. This cannot even be described as science fiction, it really is fantasy land.
Some days the only conclusion is that the world has gone stark, staring firkin mad. I suppose that’s the intention.
Plant trees.
Develop gardens.
Protect wild areas.
These are natural biosinks part of the recycling of necessary-for-life-plant food which is not a toxin but a rounding error trace chemical, 95% emitted by Gaia.
Too easy for these idiots and no money laundering available.
Instead cut down trees put up bird choppers.
Turn farmland and wild land into solar panel farms which derange the local eco system.
Be as stupid and as ignorant as possible.
Moron is the new genius.
We don’t even need to plant more trees. They grow on their own! It’s amazing!
But sure, if anyone wants to plant a tree, for example, a nice apple tree, or a hazelnut in their garden, they should feel free to plant one or two or even three. I like trees, too, and they provide large amounts of firewood every so often. Which is nice, especially when the weather gets a bit chillier, whereupon I can put some CO2 back into the atmosphere to encourage more trees to grow.
I can’t take personal credit for this mind-blowing idea. I learned it from my grandpa, he was a very, very, very clever man.
And the more CO2, the more trees grow. Its almost like the Earth and the evolution of flora and fauna has some kind of balancing mechanisms for all this stuff.
Apparently Billy-Goat Gates is starting implementing his plan to save the planet by chopping down millions of trees and burying them … here ..
https://slaynews.com/news/bill-gates-launches-scheme-save-planet-climate-change-chopping-down-millions-trees/
Spoof? Gotta be a spoof! Are slaynews a bit…extreme? Seriously, I don’t know; these days, just reporting what actually happens can make you an ‘extremist’. Just trying to figure out if Bill Gates really is this unhinged. I mean, I think he is – but is this article accurate?
An area the size of the USA has greened around deserts and dry areas over the last 20 to 30 years thanks to increased air CO2 concentration, and crop yields have surged too in the same period.
Nature is quite capable of doing its own carbon capture, maybe we should just leave it alone to get on with it.
No money in that for anybody of course.
It’s stealing food out of the mouths of baby plants. Shame on them.
Every single £ the Government spends on this is a £ wasted that could go to other areas (Armed Forces, Debt Reduction, Road Repairs etc). A more efficient way of disposing of this money would be to take our remaining gold reserves out to sea and chuck them over the side.
Besides CO2 does NOT warm the atmosphere above around 300ppm, yet CO2 increases have helped with substantial greening of the planet in the last 4-5 decades.
CO2 is entirely beneficial to the planet. The optimum level is probably double what we have today.
Yes but global warming isn’t about science. It is about “Official Science” or Government approved science. We can argue all day about “science”, and while we do that the authorities get on with their agenda, which as I say has nothing to do with science and never has. ——-We had the same big government control plans over all aspects of our life proposed in the seventies when we had a cooling scare since temperatures had actually fallen 30 years. ——Or as someone once pointed out “practical Politics is about scaring the populace with an endless series of hobgoblins” ——-Then the government can come along and save us all.
Agree with all that. However I think it is helpful to repeat the true science occasionally, as some people may not know it, or have had it knocked out of them. The whole Net Zero is patently fraudulent and people need to know that. Reduce waste and litter, clearing up the oceans, preventing over fishing all worthwhile. Saving CO2 …. nah.
Reducing litter and cleaning up oceans etc isn’t so much “science” as common sense.
I asked google; What is the expression for pointless task?
Taken from an old Greek tale, there is the phrase – a Sisyphean task. Sisyphus was given the task of carrying water up a hill with a slotted spoon. A Sisyphean task is one that is pointless because repeating it, engaging it will never bring the desired result – accomplishment.
I just saw a poll on GB News that 50% of the public want Labour to do its 28 billion Green Spending. —–This is quite bizarre.— Are these same people prepared to spend upwards of 10 thousand quid on a heat pump to be colder? —–We can get energy from the wind and sun and we can turn perfectly good food into ethanol etc etc. But what is important is whether doing these things make economic sense. But when it comes to renewables versus hydrocarbons though it is no contest. Fossil Fuel wins hands down because it is concentrated energy that provides energy all day everyday, and is by far the cheapest way to produce energy. Renewables are diffuse forms of energy production that cannot provide base load, require huge areas of land that could be better used for something else and are way more expensive, and only produce energy on a part time basis. ———So 50% of people in that poll on GB News are seriously misinformed, but is that any surprise, since mainstream media have drummed into them day and night that there is a climate crisis and the only way to solve it is to remove fossil fuels. If we ask that 50% how much energy they think we get from wind and sun they will likely not know. They will probably assume that in order to solve this alleged climate crisis that all we have to do is get rid of coal and gas and replace it with wind and sun and everything will tick along just fine. ——–NOPE. It won’t. —–In the real world there are laws. Laws of nature, laws of physics etc and laws of Economics. 85% of the worlds energy comes from fossil fuels for one reason —-Because they make economic sense. ——If we ask the 50% on the GB news poll if they are prepared to have Billions of Green spending in conjunction with a huge drop in their living standards then their answers would be very different.
That also means 50% DON’t want it. 1% more and we are in the majority…
Yes but the power of the Green Lobby and the bought and paid for media have managed to convince a very large amount of people (according this poll 50%) into being anti fossil fuels and wanting astronomical sums spent on inferior green technologies. ——-With proper Investigative journalists scrutinising the green nonsense this figure would be well down, probably nearer 10 or 20 %. ——As long as the mass brainwashing that never gets seriously questioned continues, an unsuspecting public are going to continue to be hoodwinked.
I wonder what the age demographic is of that 50%? I do feel that the younger generation have been completely captured by carbon capture.
I did the maths recently. Nothing says scam like the figures.
0.04% of our atmosphere = CO2
Naturally occurring = 97% of this
Anthropogenic = 3% of this
UK emissions = 1% of this
So the amount of benign gaseous atmosphere our government is bravely fighting on our behalf is 0.00001%.
If this was plastered all over billboards across the country with the amount of precious income people had spent on it, our politicians would be nailed to them.
“So the amount of benign gaseous atmosphere our government is bravely fighting on our behalf is 0.00001%”
Amazing isn’t it.
Saving ‘the climate’ and reducing the world’s 5th largest economy down to ‘net zero’ all to wipe out 0.00001% of Co2 – necessary for life, greening chemical.
Hey that number is about the same as my chance of dying from the terrifying flying, gyrating, mutating, ever-changing, wide-ranging, Rona…..
So if UK did zero its CO2 production (requiring all citizens to stop breathing), the global reduction in CO2 would be equivalent to the removal of 1 molecule of CO2 among 8.3 million other atmospheric molecules, if my maths serves me correctly.
I realised as far back as 2007 that it was not about the climate. The climate is simply the excuse for the Eco Socialism ——-Sustainable Development. —–It is a package of Social Justice Garbage and equality for all with enough money to live on, even those who refuse to do any work.
Carbon capture is a pointless sisyphean task if ever there was one. At least Sisyphus grew stronger and reduced his risk of stroke/heart attack through the exercise.
Great article. However, the situation is even worse than indicated. Note that the 176Mt CO2 capture is predicated upon just 594TWh of demand. This represents an approximate halving of final energy demand per capita by 2050. There are no rich countries with such low energy use. Moreover, Oxford SSEE indicated that 1,500TWh per year of demand would be a “conservative” estimate. So, with the same generation mix we’ll need ~2.5X the storage or 440Mt, nearly nine times the Government’s ambition.
We’re nowhere near hitting the renewable generation targets either. So, heaven knows where the generation capacity is going to come from when we have Alok Sharma blowing up coal-fired power stations and we hamstring nuclear by requiring 40,000 pages of guff to be produced before we give plants like Sizewell C even a provisional go ahead.
Link to SSEE paper:
https://www.smithschool.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/2023-09/Could-Britains-energy-demand-be-met-entirely-by-wind-and-solar-SSEE-working-paper.pdf
Article showing how far we are away from renewable targets:
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/ed-stoned-labour-net-zero-plan-undeliverable
“There are no rich countries with such low energy use.”
Indeed. The solution is obviously for us to become a non-rich country, which our leaders are intent on achieving.
‘Carbon’ capture (before usage or storage) is a stupid idea. For one thing, it is a misnomer; it’s actually about capturing carbon dioxide, not carbon.
It takes energy to compress and isolate CO2 from any exhaust gasses. The energy required must come from somewhere and in most cases will be drawn from the energy released by whatever it was we were burning. The energy used for ‘carbon’ capture necessarily means there is less energy to do whatever it was we were burning the fuel for in the first place. We either need to burn even more fuel to get the energy we wanted or we have to make do with less energy. In a nutshell, it is wasteful; it reduces efficiency.
But when it comes to the CO2 scam nothing seems to matter. —-Cost doesn’t matter. Practicality doesn’t matter. Economics doesn’t matter. Human well being and prosperity doesn’t matter. ——All that matters is the Malthusian Politics being implemented.
That’s because all which matters to these people is getting as much government subsidies, that is, taxpayer money, for their technological fantasies for as long as possible. This comparable to marketing ‘vegan’ meat replacement products by pointing out the abhorrent conditions of industrial scale mass farming. These aren’t supposed to improve because if they did, they couldn’t be used to browbeat people into spending their money for such products anymore. The whole point of the climate emergency is to distract people with something scary so that they won’t notice how all of their money vanishes into a black hole.
There is also the fact that Modern Monetary Theory where governments can simply print money means they no longer need to worry about the cost.
“Net Zero Crisis Deepens as Government Says it is Only Planning to Build a QUARTER of the Carbon Capture Capacity Needed to Hit Green Target”
Another Farce in the series of long running plays from the Whitehall Theatre London.
In other News: major aircraft manufacturer says it is only planning to make planes with one wing.
I hear Pigs fart a semi tone higher due to global warming ——“We must act now”.
Tiny detail: “There are of course all number of reasons…”. Does the writer mean “all manner of…”?
There is no climate crisis. CO2 is not the earth’s thermostat. CO2 is needed for plant growth & human survival. CO2 levels are already at dangerously low levels. Reading some of the comments here shows the effectiveness of the climate cult propaganda.
Why are people always asked to disprove what climate alarmists cannot prove in the first place, and if they cannot do that then whatever the alarmists say must automatically be classed as ultimate truth? ———-Truth though is much stranger than fiction, because truth has to make sense. ———————————I stole that from Mark Twain