Labour is chucking cash at a carbon capture con – so we’re taking action

What if, instead of transforming our energy system to tackle the climate crisis, we could just carry on? Maybe we could keep merrily burning fossil fuels and capture the carbon? Perhaps we could just collect it all and stick it under a rock in the North Sea?

This fairytale future is the story of carbon capture, a technology described by George Monbiot as a “scam that will fuel climate chaos”.  But it’s a fairytale that has captured the government, which is now promoting this risky and unproven technology and giving the oil majors our money. It’s already started. On 10 December 2024 it handed a £10bn subsidy to BP and Equinor to build a gas-fired power station with carbon capture on Teeside.

But the methane burned at the plant would be supplied from around the world in a process of extraction and transport that is plagued with leaks. And since methane is a potent greenhouse gas, these upstream emissions – which can’t be captured at the plant – significantly worsen global heating. Recent studies show the plant’s total emissions would far exceed any carbon stored under the sea.  

Despite the project’s crafty name – Net Zero Teesside – it can never, ever be carbon neutral.  It just doesn’t make sense for the government to fund new fossil fuel plants, even with carbon capture, when solar panels and wind turbines are already producing thousands of gigawatts of clean energy across the globe.   

And carbon capture is still entirely unproven at industrial scale. There are only two projects in the world that have tried to reduce emissions after combustion, and both of them have failed. The Public Accounts Committee has called carbon capture a “high risk” strategy, highlighting that subsidies for carbon capture are funded by the taxpayer and consumer levies – a double hit.

So why is Labour throwing cash at carbon capture, instead of investing in renewables that are already working all over the world?

The fossil fuel industry’s sums don’t add up. Now we’re working with environmentalist and campaigner Andrew Boswell to challenge Labour using your money to fund this risky and  unproven technology. On 10 March, we took the first step in legal action against this reckless subsidy, submitting a claim for a judicial review of the government’s failure to take all the financial and environmental impacts into account. 

We can’t allow the UK to waste money on fossil fuel fairytales. Labour must invest in cheap, clean, renewable power that delivers results. 

Together we can expose the carbon capture con and make Labour drop a subsidy that risks locking us into fossil fuel dependency for years to come.