Carbon Capture and climate change: will CCUS ever make a real difference?                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Only a few months ago, as part of the Autumn 2024 budget, £21.7bn of public funding was pledged to Carbon Capture over the next 25 years; all in the hopes of kick-starting the industry in the UK.

But, when it comes to tackling climate change, will CCUS ever make a real difference?

Will CCUS ever make a real difference to climate change?

According to the International Energy Agency, there are only around 45 commercial Carbon Capture Usage and Storage (CCUS) facilities across the world, capturing 50 million tonnes of CO2 every year, where 35 billion tonnes of carbon are released into the atmosphere from fossil fuels globally each year.

As such, CCUS really is a drop in the figurative ocean when it comes to directly tackling climate change and, especially here in the UK, CCUS has really struggled to get up on its feet, partly due to a lack of government funding & incentives, as well as a lack of awareness.

And, although £21.7bn of public funding may sound like a vast injection of cash into CCUS implementation, will it really make a difference, especially here in the UK?

Tackling the underlying issues with CCUS adoption in the UK

Well, £21 billion is a huge sum of money to pass onto a specific initiative, especially from the public purse and particularly during a time when taxes and the general cost of living are rising for the average household, but - when looking deeper into where these funds are actually going - it’s clear that such funds are actually going towards a very specific number of handpicked CCUS projects; principally CCUS clusters in Teesside and Merseyside.

This is undoubtedly a fantastic opportunity for the North of England and, hopefully, will see at least 1 million homes in the area enjoy low-carbon energy.

However, what this doesn’t do is tackle the underlying issues with CCUS adoption across the UK. Underlying issues such as:

• The expense of CCUS technology and fitting or retrofitting this to projects

• The lack of infrastructure surrounding CCUS

• Regulatory roadblocks associated with CCUS adoption

• A lack of public acceptance of CCUS

• A ‘soft’ market for carbon, once captured

Essentially, CCUS technologies are expensive and often too expensive to make a project feasible.

What’s more, the UK lacks the infrastructure needed to fully support CCUS and the carbon captured; there simply aren’t enough storage facilities available, not to mention that the market is saturated, and the public still don’t fully accept CCUS technologies as a viable option to reducing carbon emissions, preferring instead ‘clean’ energy sources that don’t create carbon, or create very low amounts of carbon, in the first place.

Consequently, although £21.7 billion of public funding allocated to CCUS over the next 25 years may sound like an industry-changing ‘win’ for the sector, it’s possible that this much needed cash injection is actually misplaced and, in order to see CCUS really make a difference to climate change, we actually need these funds to go towards things like:

• Reducing the cost of fitting and retrofitting CCUS technologies to current & existing projects

• Creating infrastructure around CCUS and particularly ensuring an appropriate amount of storage facilities are placed across the UK

• A public awareness campaign focused on helping the public understand the importance of CCUS and its place in the reduction of carbon emissions

Indeed, CCUS could make a huge difference to UK and global carbon emissions and transform so many industries; it could reduce carbon emissions by billions, not just millions, of tonnes per year, but it looks as though the road may unfortunately be an especially long one for Carbon Capture Usage and Storage in the real world.