Is this Labour’s maddest net zero project yet?
Government explores plan to strip carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at eye-watering expense
JONATHAN LEAKE
It could be Ed Miliband’s oddest and costliest legacy. Just days before leaving his role as energy secretary, he signed off on a proposal to make Britain a “global leader” in greenhouse gas removals – technologies that literally strip carbon dioxide from the air around us.
The commitment, tucked away in a response to a review released just before Andy Burnham moved Miliband to the Foreign Office, is a minor footnote in his tenure. But the task he has left for successor Miatta Fahnbulleh is huge.
The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is just 0.04pc, meaning that removing it requires cleaning at least 1,600 tonnes of air for each tonne of CO2.
Moreover, humanity pumps another 40 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere each year – adding to the 2.5 trillion tonnes emitted since the industrial revolution.
Less than 1pc of that is produced by the UK. But in a report signed off by Miliband this month, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero committed Britain to kick-starting the clean-up.
“The UK is well-positioned to be a global leader in greenhouse gas removal (GGR) technologies with our world-class research institutions, engineering expertise and access to geological storage,” it said. “We are progressing a world-leading, holistic GGR policy framework to enable UK deployment at scale.”
The Energy Department has even put taxpayers’ money into the plan, investing £56m in a dozen trials of Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS).
Why, though, would Miliband want to commit the UK to the Sisyphean task of stripping CO2 from the atmosphere?
At the heart of the matter is Labour’s net zero push.
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But opposition is growing. Critics argue that the costs and energy needed to extract CO2 from air will always make such schemes uneconomic.
Real Zero Europe, an umbrella group for organisations including Friends of the Earth and the Corporate Europe Observatory, argues that carbon capture projects are merely attempts to whitewash the fossil fuel industry by making aviation look “clean”.
[…]
Whitehead’s own review admits that sucking CO2 directly from the air will cost somewhere between £259 and £578 a tonne.
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