A story in the Telegraph last week featured a report by Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) which recommended the Government commit to a £30 billion project to pull CO2 from the air. According to the report, Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) machines sited across the east coast could separate the greenhouse gas from air and pump it to underground storage facilities, thereby helping the U.K. to meet its ambitious 2050 Net Zero target. Not only is this extraordinarily expensive idea pointless in itself, it exposes the equally pointless and expensive constellation of publicly-funded lobbying organisations.
According to ESC, “carbon capture in its various forms is a critical component of a low-cost energy transition”, and “without it, at scale, we risk non-compliance with our Net Zero requirement”. And here is the thing that would, were such things subject to public debate, cause millions of people to scratch their heads. So what if the U.K. does not comply with its Government’s self-imposed target? What is the ‘risk’? And why should the public fork out billions of pounds merely for a daft machine that serves no function other than help a Government achieve its ambition that nobody else really cares about?
Madder still, the ESC admits that DACCS “remains unproven at scale”. This raises two important problems.
First, if something has yet to be proven at such a gigantic scale, any estimate of its cost is both for the birds and in all probability, like all Government-backed projects such as HS2 and wind power, will exceed those estimates. Government vanity project HS2, for example, originally had a similar estimated cost of £37.5 billion in 2009 prices. But by 2020, estimates put the cost well north of £100 billion.
Second, it shows yet again that no government, no political party, no MP or peer, no think tank or its wonks, no academic at a lofty research outfit, no green lobbyist or campaigner, and no journalist has any idea how Net Zero will be achieved, but nonetheless nearly all of them fought for such targets to be imposed on us.
It is a problem known as putting the cart before the horse. And it is a characteristic of all climate-related policies that they are driven by ambition, not reality. Not even ESC can explain what DACCS is, how it will work or how much it will cost. All they really know is that it will be required to remove 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year from 2050 – approximately a tenth of the U.K.’s current domestic annual emissions.
Vanity and intransigence drives this irrational push for solutions to non-problems. Air capture of CO2 serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It won’t make a dent in atmospheric CO2 concentration. It won’t change the weather. It won’t make anyone’s life better. And it won’t stand up to any meaningful cost-benefit analysis. £30 billion, roughly equivalent to £500 per head of the population, could do vastly more good were it to be spent in countless other ways, from healthcare through to addressing genuine environmental issues such as water quality. Of course, not spending the money on such contraptions would likely do more good by leaving that much money in people’s pockets to spend how they see fit.
The Telegraph spots the problem. DACCS plants “would need to be powered by wind, nuclear or solar energy so as not to generate as much CO2 as they save”. A fleet of green generators would be working to power the DACCS plants, merely to hit targets. Recent studies show that existing DACCS technology is extremely inefficient, requiring a whopping 2,500 kilowatt hours to isolate just one tonne of CO2. To extract 48 million tonnes of CO2 would therefore require power stations with a capacity of 14 gigawatts – that’s more than four times the capacity of Hinkley Point C. That nuclear power station itself, dubbed at the time “the most expensive power station in the world”, was initially estimated to cost £26 billion but more recent estimates are putting the cost closer to £46 billion. Thus the cost of a widespread DACCS project – with batteries included – is likely to be in the order of seven times greater than ECS claim. And we have not yet even considered the operating cost.
All this puts me in mind of those fun little clips of devices whose only function is to press a switch to turn themselves off. On Youtube, electronics hobbyists compete to build the most impressive ‘useless machine’. Here is one such contender.
But the problem of useless machinery goes far beyond the device itself. Not unlike white elephants such as wind turbines, Energy Systems Catapult is a strange outfit summoned up out of the blobbish technocracy required by the green agenda. ECS is part of an umbrella group of government-backed private companies called the Catapult Network, which itself seems to be part of Innovate U.K., which in turn is part of UK Research and Innovation – the successor public funding body to the erstwhile research councils. ESC and its sister organisations each benefit from millions of pounds of public funding, topped up by opaque philanthropic funding (i.e., green blob organisations), which as ESC claims, allows them to “support Central and Devolved Governments with the evidence, insights and innovations to incentivise Net Zero action”.
The problem at its core is that publicly-funded organisations, though set up as ‘independent’ bodies run at arms-length from Government, are nonetheless wholly committed to political agendas. Seemingly intended to ‘drive prosperity’ through R&D, such a constellation of opaque agencies are tantamount to the Government picking ‘winners’, who invariably turn out to be abject losers, at vast public expense. There are no consequences for such wonks spaffing hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money on pilots that come to nought, or glossy reports that might just as well be case studies from Narnia. Criticism of ideas such as CO2 capture is excluded from academia and business because even if any critics were not already disinclined to apply for roles within the network, and were then not rejected for their obvious hostility to the dominant political culture of such bullshit factories, their politically inconvenient work would soon be shelved.
In other words, the green agenda has produced a useless machine whose only function is to produce designs for useless machines. The parent idea of DACCS, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), in which CO2 is taken from power stations, compressed and then stuffed under the sea, was an idea that attracted attention following the Climate Change Act. But despite the government offering a billion pounds in funding competitions to prove the concept, the project failed and today remains economically unproven. The even crazier idea of pulling CO2 – which is still a trace gas at just 400 parts per million – from the air and then burying it underground faces a similar future. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s climate agenda will run on, as usual, built on extremely expensive pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Nobody has any idea how to achieve Net Zero without destroying ourselves.
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