Credit: Imogen Thomas
Dr Andrew Boswell writes on Carbon Capture and Storage for Fuel Poverty Action
Following advice from the Climate Change Committee (CCC), our government is preparing to spend hundreds of billions of pounds on Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology. A massive commitment with one clear consequence – it will make your energy bills significantly more expensive for decades to come.
And the money is mainly for power stations burning gas and wood that increase pollution.
You pay for this staggering price tag
The CCC advises a colossal investment of £350 – £408 billion over the next 25 years to build and run CCS plants, see below:
The biggest share is for gas and biomass (the two left hand columns). Up to £264 billion is proposed for CCS-enabled gas power stations and for burning wood at power stations like Drax in Yorkshire. At Drax, the plan is to add high cost CCS equipment to the existing biomass operations – creating Bioenergy with CCS or BECCS.
There’s a huge running cost burden too. By 2050, just operating all this CCS could cost £18 billion per year, with £10 billion per year solely for the gas and biomass plants.
Where does this money come from?
The government itself admits costs will be passed on to the public. A huge chunk comes from you. Your taxes will fund subsidies to these polluters.
And your energy bill will take a hit too with the energy companies getting their costs, and profits, paid by levies on your bills.
Why CCS makes energy more expensive
CCS plants are incredibly complex and expensive to build and operate with vast arrays of chemicals, buildings, pipes and furnaces. The technology is unproven, and it may not scale up.
And Carbon Capture isn’t free to operate. Around 20-30% of the power plant’s own electricity output is needed just to run the CCS equipment. Power stations with CCS need to burn more gas or wood pellets adding further costs per unit of electricity generated on your bill.
The captured CO₂ isn’t magically gone. It must be compressed into a liquid, transported (often via hundreds of miles of new pipelines), and pumped deep underground. This is very sensitive to sub-sea geology, and the later risks are not properly understood. These “burial” costs will add another regular charge added to your energy bill with £13 billion of special subsidies already allocated just for the first projects.
Terrible Value for Money
Spending this much on gas and biomass CCS isn’t just expensive – it’s shockingly bad value compared to genuine clean energy. The CCC’s own data shows that each £1 invested in wind, solar, and energy storage will generate 5.6 times MORE electricity by 2050.
And every pound spent propping up gas and biomass with CCS is a pound NOT invested in home insulation and retrofit to warm our homes and bring down bills, or in building more cheap wind and solar farms with better energy storage. We’re wasting money on the most expensive option.
High bills and high emissions are locked in
This investment isn’t a short-term fix; it locks in high costs and ongoing pollution. Even in the late 2040s, the CCC projections show £4.5 billion per year still being spent just on building new gas+CCS, or gas-hydrogen cofiring plants. These plants will operate well beyond 2050. Consumers will pay for their construction and operation for generations.
Both these technologies involve very high overseas emissions—methane leaks from imported US gas and carbon loss from forests cut for biomass pellets. But the government and their advisers, the CCC, rely on narrow UK emissions accounting rules that ignore pollution caused abroad. So the damaging climate impact of using gas and biomass with CCS is swept under the carpet. This is fundamentally dishonest policy making. We’re spending billions worsening the climate crisis while raising bills!
Why is this happening? Follow the money and influence
The government and CCS lobby misleadingly promote CCS as a method for “hard-to-abate” industries like cement where it can potentially cut emissions. Yet the CCC recommends spending only £22 billion (5-6% of total CCS spend) on industrial CCS. The majority of proposed investment in CCS is about extending fossil gas and biomass burning (see the infographic above).
And the fossil fuel industry lobbied intensely to secure this massive, long-term subsidy for their industry, see the film below.
The bottom line: Higher bills, wasted money, missed opportunity
The UK’s planned £264 billion investment in CCS for gas and biomass power is a recipe for soaring energy bills. Consumers will pay for construction, inefficient operation, extra fuel, and CO₂ burial for decades through higher taxes and direct energy bill levies.
And it is a massive waste of money as it directs resources to the most expensive, least efficient and most polluting way to generate electricity, whilst locking us into fossil fuel dependency. It stops us from investing from proven, cheaper solutions to warm homes and lower energy bills.
Take Action:
Decisions now by Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves are locking in a huge burden on you and your children for decades to come. If you want your money to go towards lower bills, warmer homes, and truly clean energy, please support our campaign.
Contact your MP today and demand they oppose this waste of money!
If you have time, please watch our short campaign film!
Dr Andrew Boswell runs a consultancy Climate Emergency Science Law (CESL) with the mission to promote science based climate law and policy making. He is the lead campaigner on the #ScrapCarbonCapture campaign which is calling for the Government to have an independent scientific review of carbon capture, and to remove it from the upcoming Climate plan when it is based on burning gas or wood (as at Drax). He took the Government to Court as a private individual when it approved the Net Zero Teesside CCS gas plant in the full knowledge that it increased carbon pollution.
