Government warned over ‘high risk’ multibillion-pound backing for carbon capture The Government’s £22 billion backing of “unproven” technology to capture and store carbon emissions is high risk, MPs have warned.
The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has called on the Government to assess whether its support for carbon capture utilisation and storage in the UK will be affordable for taxpayers and consumers, who face high energy bills and the cost-of-living crisis.
Carbon capture utilisation and storage (CCUS) involves capturing the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels for energy or from industrial processes such as cement production and uses or transports them for storage permanently underground – for example, in disused oil fields under the sea.
And the MPs also raised concerns over the use of CCUS to capture emissions from bioenergy in a bid to create “negative” emissions to offset other pollution, amid questions over the sustainability and genuine reductions in carbon from burning wood for electricity and then storing it.
After years of trying to get CCUS schemes off the ground, the previous government announced £20 billion in funding in March 2023 for early deployment of the technology, and in October 2024 Labour unveiled £21.7 billion for two “carbon capture clusters” in Teesside and Merseyside.
