The Government has just announced plans to spend nearly £22bn to subsidise carbon capture projects. The BBC reports:
The Government has pledged nearly £22bn for projects to capture and store carbon emissions from energy, industry and hydrogen production.
It said the funding for two "carbon capture clusters" on Merseyside and Teesside, promised over the next 25 years, would create thousands of jobs, attract private investment and help the U.K. meet climate goals.
Up to £21.7bn will subsidise three projects on Teesside and Merseyside to support the development of the clusters, including the infrastructure to transport and store carbon.
It will also support two transport and storage networks carrying captured carbon to deep geological storage in Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.
The Government said the move would give industry confidence to invest in the U.K., attracting £8bn of private investment, directly creating 4,000 jobs and supporting 50,000 in the long term.
It will also help remove 8.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions each year, officials said.
The projects are expected to start storing captured carbon from 2028.
Although much of the money will only start flowing after carbon capture operations begin, billions will have to be spent in the next few years building the infrastructure needed. Yet nobody in the world has yet proven that carbon capture can work commercially at scale. So we could end up chucking billions down the drain.
And only 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide will end up
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Surely the greatest mis allocation of capital since what – The great Pyramids of Giza? No even if functionally pointless at least there’s a legacy. But capturing Co2 has to win the prize for the most pointless project in the history of mankind.
22 billion quid and not one single watt of electricity produced.
But terrawatts consumed… and to achieve what? FA basically!
Genuine question for any scientists or engineers on this site, if it is really possible to capture co2 at scale from the air, why aren’t all of those companies that rely on the gas, who in recent years have reported a shortage of supply, not already doing this?
Cos it costs a fortune… food grade co2 generally comes as a side product of fertiliser manufacturing iirc, hence low cost
They could force taxpayers to pay £5Trillion for Carbon Capture and Storage and we could have them all over our Island working 24/7/365 for a decade.
A volcano could blow in Iceland or Under the Pacific Ocean and wipe out the Carbon Captured by these useless machines in a few weeks.
Utterly, utterly useless and futile.
Our dear leaders cannot be this stupid, surely, so they must be under the control of another entity. WEF / UN / China / David Icke / insert preference here.
The Daily Telegraph at the very least should have this front and centre / above the fold. The maths is very simple:
5%. The share of total planetary CO2 emissions created by human activities.
1%. The share of the above 5% created by human activities in the UK
8%. The amount of the 1% above that will be removed by the proposed CCS system.
8% of 1% of 5% is 0.004%.
£22 billion. The amount of money we’re spending to reduce planetary CO2 emissions by 0.004% and all while the BRICS nations open a new and additional coal fired power station every week.
Mainstream people need to wake up to this insanity.
With £22Bn of taxpayers money we could build 7 Rolls Royce Small Modular Nuclear Reactors that would give us a chance of reducing the blackouts that will start occurring by the end of this decade, if not before. Carbon dioxide capture and burial is the most idiotic Government policy ever implemented.
Exactly – going back a year or 4, the ~£500 billion printed and wasted on covi-bollox could have funded, even at latest est cost of £34B each, ~14 Hinkley Point C nuclear stations… 3,200Mw each = 7% of grid, 14 = about 100% of what we need in total based on existing usage
“It is hard to think of a more stupid waste of public money.“. It is hard to think of a more stupid energy secretary.
The problem is, how do we small band gather together enough people to stage protest marches in London like the countryside march, the Gulf war march, with over a million on the streets of the major cities. Placards with pictures of every ex-politician or family member earning millions from this con trick, telling the ordinary people how money from their hard earned income is going straight to these sheisters? Where are the sensible fund managers who would underwrite this endeavour the same as the green backers do? How do we enthuse and enrage the masses about what is being stolen from them?
It’s a challenge isn’t it – somehow we need a really clear example or message that cuts through. For me I’d say it’s likely linked to explaining the reality of peoples energy bills in a clear, logical way or following the money on huge projects like this carbon capture and showing who benefits. Seeing the bad response labour got to a few £100k bungs of goods and services it feels like a good angle…
needs something that can go viral – memes seem pretty lightweight, but get something that ‘sticks’ and you can reach millions
Works out at 2.5%. To get to 100% , if that’s at all possible will cost 880 billion over 10 years or 88billion per year. FFS
So this is levelling up for the North. When Keynes suggested that we should just pay people to dig holes and fill them in, we thought he was joking!
Slightly off piste but worth a watch
https://expose-news.com/2024/10/05/english-bill-of-rights-you-are-english-not-british/
How much carbon can be captured by planting £22Bn worth of trees? How much carbon can be prevented by building £22Bn worth of Nuclear power? Or even how much Carbon can be prevented by building £22Bn of windfarm and solar. Or insulating homes? It is nothing but a massive vanity project. I despair.
Millibrains’s next project: extracting sunshine from cucumbers.
Criminals. They are criminals. We need to try these economic traitors and bring back capital punishment.
If it’s one thing the Labour Party is good at is wasting other people’s money.
It’s all of them though isn’t it – the Uniparty
Wouldn’t it be easier, and just as effective, to bury the £22 billion in the ground?
If it physically existed probably, at least with old notes it would rot away, now with polymer based ones you are kind of putting oil back in the ground… maybe then generations in 100000 years could dig it up and burn it again at least? 😉
I worked on the White Rose Carbon capture project (government funded) 10 years ago. Not a lot happened then and I can’t see much happening now.
It’s comedy. Apart from “carbon capture” being on the list with making gold from.base metals, these fools think British CO2 will hover over the island waiting to be plucked from the air, so Britain can reduce its CO2.
The air above Britain then will have less CO2 than the rest of the planet because Chinese CO2 will stay over China, Indian CO2 will stay over India.
Barking mad.
Below is a table showing each countries energy production by source. Fossil (coal, oil gas) is shown in black (of course), hydro – blue, Nuclear – red, renewables – green.
…country’s…
I like how biomass and geo biomass are added to the renewables section, as if they’re somehow green!
😀😀😀
It’s hard to think of a more stupid waste of public money.
I’ll have a go.
The entirety of Government, its useless politicians, civil servants, public services, military adventurism.
What we need is Net Zero government.
“No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.”
Richard Feynman
“Take away the energy-distributing networks and the industrial machinery from America, Russia, and all the world’s industrialized countries, and within six months more than two billion swiftly and painfully deteriorating people will starve to death. Take away all the world’s politicians, all the ideologies and their professional protagonists from those same countries, and send them off on a rocket trip around the sun and leave all the countries their present energy networks, industrial machinery, routine production and distribution personnel, and no more humans will starve nor be afflicted in health than at present.
Fortunately, the do-more-with-less invention initiative does not derive from political debate, bureaucratic licensing, or private economic patronage. The… Read more »
“… send them off on a rocket trip around the sun…”
One quibble: send them into the sun.
It is coincidental that we are seeing a battle between inventor/engineer and bureaucracy over at Boca Chica. The FAA blocking SpaceX on environmental and safety reasons is looking blatantly political which is one notch up from blatantly bureaucratic, but perhaps they are the same in the end? When the FAA said SpaceX should adopt Boeing’s safety culture it is apparent that those in power are going for broke and don’t care what they say. They are in good company.
“It is not truth that matters, but victory”
A. H.
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State”
J. Goebbels
“To speak the truth is a petit-bourgeois habit, a luxury of worry-free and aimless people. To lie, on the contrary, is often justified… Read more »
“No government has the right on the truth of scientific principles”—–Which is what we now get. —“Official Science”
Seconded.
Track and Trace using PCR fraudulent test? £32Bn?
Great example – what lasting, or even immediate value, was that exercise, if not just a way to transfer vast amounts of public (freshly printed) money to the private sector…?
The money spent on track and trace was spent on all the the bloody traffic furniture being installed on our roads. The C1984 simply provided the cover for this expenditure.
Definitely some of that in there I agree. Also some HUGE contracts to various facility management type companies, like Serco amongst others
What for and what measurable affect will any of this have apart from feeling virtuous? It is a modern day version of indulgencies.
That graphic should be an absolute eye opener for the blind braindead masses that still believe in all this codswallop!
If anyone has a better focused copy of this picture please post.
I saw someone the other day say we are exporting our industry and importing virtue
Standard operating procedure.
Half a trillion on “covid”
Goodness knows how much on “net zero”
Not to mention enormous public expenditure on a lot of useless rubbish that doesn’t need doing/should be done by the private sector
Mount pinatubo and Novarupta in Alaska exhaled more co2 than all of mankind has ever produced during his existence on the planet! Thank goodness Ed millimeter is spending 22 billion of our money on capturing a farts worth of it!
I too never tire of finding appropriate milli/mili-prefixed nouns for Millibrain.
It is good to know that the £22Bn black hole the Tories are claimed to have left will not be alone but will be joined by its twin carbon-black hole.
Black holes matter.
For some reason the £300bn (or was it £400bn) spent on lockdowns hasn’t cause a black hole. And the Labour party, along with Sturgeon and Drakeford wanted more money spent and harder and longer lockdowns, so the Tories spending all that money was OK then and now £22bn is very bad?
£400-500 billion is the estimate of what was printed, then spent during covi-bollocks – why people are surprised inflation in the last ~4 years has devalued our currency by ~40% escapes me… it had to happen, and always would
Agreed. I came across the graph below showing inflation over recent years. The point where money was printed for Lockdowns is evident. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and Brexit are not evident. I added the arrows and annotation.
And it continues relentlessly, printing money for renewable subsidies, for NHS, for public sector pay awards etc etc – any new cash added to the pile, naturally devalues what is out there already. The only variables to me are a) when does the effect get noticed, how long before it’s seen and b) could you build something of lasting value with it so it doesn’t simply disappear?
Great chart!
Isn’t that where we could send the C02?
‘Tax payer money and energy bills’. So we pay it all then
Well spotted!
“Yet nobody in the world has yet proven that carbon capture can work commercially at scale.”
To know if something will work, one first has to identify the problem it is supposed to fix.
When one has identified the problem, one then needs to ask the question: is it even a problem? What will happen if we simply do nothing?
But of course, politicians cannot run around looking important doing nothing. And grifters cannot grift without stupid, vain politicians who dare not say (nor even think) that CO2 is not actually a problem.
Clown world!
Back in reality, CO2 is vital to support plant life. More is not a problem, not at all.
Why not provide gyms with exercise bikes modified to convert human muscle power into electricity while helping people keep fit at the same time? Each month whoever generated the most renewable electricity for the grid would receive a prize from Ed Miliband in person. The reduction in obesity would be good for the nation’s health thus helping to protect the NHS.
“a prize from Ed Miliband in person”
Lol, I’m sure lots of people would find that really appealing 🙂
Always wondered why none of the gym equipment companies have pushed this angle before, you’d think it would be a good selling angle…
only need low voltage generators on all the kit,
going to a large battery – gym can then use power stored or flog it
How do we know when the Carbon store is full? Can we send in a gang of wine treaders to tamp it all down and make a bit more space? These questions deserve answers!
And if it leaks?
The don’t care
I hope it does, we need more Co2, not less.
And how do we know that they have done anything at all? Inert, smell-less invisible gas, not going to explode. They could just make up the numbers; we stuffed 5k tons into the North Sea last week, Carbon payment please!
I would be very worried if I lived in a low lying area around the Irish Sea or the North Sea, because if it were to leak the giant gas bubble (fart?) that would erupt could well cause a tidal wave that would engulf the shoreline.
Morning Campers 🤩 I am tech illiterate so all the donation stuff goes over my head . I don’t listen to Toby & Nick any more & now articles are going behind a paywall !
Back on topic – What will be done with the stored C02 ???
One huge giant fart into outer space?
Equivalent of sweeping it under the carpet… (or the North Sea is their plan I understand)
Many are wary of challenging the establishment’s fake consensus that CO2 is a deadly threat when in fact there is a wealth of evidence from unpoliticised science that CO2 is most definitely not a threat. For example, Professor William Happer recently recorded an easy-to-understand presentation explaining why a rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 will cause negligible global warming (because it is already “saturated”) but would be hugely beneficial to agriculture and forestry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2nhssPW77I&t=11s.
https://youtu.be/MSZgoFyuHC8
Tickled me…
Fit bird, but complete green shayte.
Absolutely seemed to be promoting EVs and all sorts of nonsense.
Perfect 👍
Utterly BRILLIANT!
HS2.
“It is hard to think of a more stupid waste of public money.”
————
Oh, I don’t know. How about £100 billion+ on a vanity train line from Not-Even-London to Not-Quite-Birmingham that will NEVER be economically viable?
Actually there is a long list of stupid wastes of public money …. Keir-Ching! and Red Ed are simply extending it with the Carbon Capture nonsense.
Don’t agree – at the end of that investment you have some useful infrastructure good for 50+ years, at the ‘end’ of this you have a pointless energy burner doing a pointless task?