I am not an expert on CCS, and prepared to be agnostic. Also I usually have a lot of time for George Monbiot, but this week I was puzzled by his vitriolic attack on carbon capture proposals, backed up by a number of Guardian readers.
Both the IPCC and the UK’s own Committee on Climate Change (CCC) support a crucial role for carbon capture. IPCC extends this to the much more expensive DACC - direct atmospheric extraction as opposed to the presumed retro-fitting to capture at the point of combustion. Both IPCC and CCC are serious bodies, tasked with climate concerns, and with access to the best technical and science expertise. CCC has an excellent overview of the UK energy and CO2 scene. Neither are compromised by financial links to fossil lobby groups.
First nobody should dispute the simple truth that the cheapest and first best solution is to burn as little fossil fuel as possible. So we should pick the low hanging fruit first. That includes not just home insulation but also "obvious" but contested proposals like suppressing bitcoin and many other cryptos (ultra high energy use and zero societal value).
Second the UK has proven itself perfectly capable of screwing up major projects (cf HS2) so there are no absolute certainties this won’t happen again with CCS, but that concern applies to any of the many major infrastructure or retro-fitting projects that we need to get to net zero, including heat pumps and grid expansion.
Third the much harder and costlier option of DACC will certainly be a necessity as we are already well past the degree of CO2 limitation needed for 1.5 degrees. And no, we can’t do it all through managing land use. If we can’t even do retro-fitting to fossil plant or industrial process CCS, what hope is there for DACC ?
Fourth the abandonment of earlier CCS projects surely stemmed from the shameful austerity programmes and Tory retreat from Cameron's “Green crap” rather than from infeasibility. Here there are more shades of the British disease in which political vacillation stalled the kind of nuclear programmes the French completed so successfully in the last century
Finally the recent September 2023 Royal Society report also touches on CCS, but makes it clear that alternatives like hydrogen storage are also substantial infrastructure projects with significant project risks.
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