10.10.2024
Nothing clean about it
Labour is pouring billions into over-hyped CCS technology as part of an effort to prolong the life of fossil fuel capitalism, writes Eddie Ford. Lobbying by oil companies has paid off handsomely
Last week, the government announced plans to commit almost £22 billion over 25 years to fund two carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects - one in Teesside in north-east England, and a second in north-west England/north Wales. Already giving you a clue about what is driving these projects, the East Coast Cluster - as it is known - is backed by oil companies including BP and the Norwegian Equinor, while the HyNet North West Cluster is being developed by the Italian oil company, Eni.
“This is absolute madness”, Tweeted George Monbiot on X. CCS has failed time and again. Labour has slashed reliable green programmes, to “pour vast sums of our money into a complete crock.” Surely, the only possible explanation is persistent “lobbying by fossil fuel companies”.1 In other words CCS and the £22 billion is about prolonging the life of fossil fuel capitalism.
CCS technology has never been used on a commercial scale in the UK before. Most of the very few CCS projects brought to fruition around the world have, yes, been sad failures. Nonetheless, the oil companies have successfully promoted CCS as some sort of green panacea that will save the planet … and provide lots of lucrative jobs in desperately poor, deindustrialised, areas.
Government officials say they are expecting or hoping that the clusters will attract private-sector investment of about £8 billion, while directly creating 4,000 jobs - then supporting 50,000 more jobs in the long term. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, declared a “new era” for clean energy jobs and chancellor Rachel Reeves - with the budget only weeks away on October 30 - said the announcement would come as one of a “drumbeat” of measures to kickstart economic growth.
This followed hints in her recent speech to Labour’s conference in Liverpool that she would alter the government’s fiscal rules and now appears to be pushing ahead with plans to borrow billions of pounds extra for infrastructure investment, despite the concerns in some quarters about the rising cost of UK government debt. Initial attempts to establish a CCS industry began in 2009 under a Labour government, but when the Tories came into office in 2010 the £1 billion funding plan faltered and was eventually scrapped five years later. The Conservatives went on to shortlist the two CCS projects for funding in 2021, but did not commit to the investment before they were voted out this year.
What about saving the planet? First of all, 25 years is a heck of a long time, given the climate crisis. When it comes to meeting the Paris Accords, which no-one seriously is now, it is already too late - you are not going to keep the temperatures down to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels as already can be seen by near countless statistics over the last few years. Yes, technically speaking, it is not yet ‘official’ that the limit has been broken, as that requires some more years for it to become the norm - nonetheless, that is where we are at.
As for CCS technology, we should not be against it as such - that would be ridiculous. But the real question, of course, is that it is being used extensively in a greenwashing fashion - hence the recently announced projects to much hoopla. For instance, in the US oil and gas companies are getting very generous subsidies for investing in CCS technologies - no wonder they are in favour of it!
But, crucially, this is a con because the oil companies use CCS to pump every last bit of gas or oil out of a field - in the process releasing loads of CO2. The extra gas and oil is then burnt or otherwise used – once gain releasing yet more CO2. In other words, CCS is not about creating some sort of carbon-neutral economy: it is about profit maximisation and appearing to be green.
Steel and coal
Yes, under certain circumstances, CCS is supportable - or at least, not something we should automatically reject. One example would be steel, as producing it from the raw requires coal and Tata, the owners of Port Talbot Steelworks in Wales initially considered using CCS technology to reduce its CO2 emissions - not objectionable as an idea. But that would have required either an entirely new CO2 pipe-distribution network or a fleet of CO2-pumping carrier ships to move the CO2 to where it can be geologically buried. Costly and hardly a profit spinner. So the Tata bosses pivoted to electric-arc furnace production which, rather than making new steel using raw materials dug from the ground, would mainly be melting down scrap.2 Even though some coal will still be required, it can be sold as green technology and hence get £500 million worth of government subsidies.
Anyway, we should not fall for the CCS hype, especially as it is not a proven technology. It is not as if all you need to do with your steel plant is capture the carbon as it comes out - pipe it out somewhere and it just stays there waiting for better days and better technology. There are numerous examples showing that, when this has been attempted, the damned stuff leaks and then you have got the additional cost - not of the capture - but of the storage which requires pipes. As a consequence, your steel, for example, would be highly uncompetitive, compared with those that don’t bother using CCS.
In this context, it is worthwhile considering the question of trade unions. At this year’s TUC conference in Brighton, a Unite motion passed narrowly, which declared that we cannot abandon fossil fuels “until we know how we will replace them, and how the jobs and communities from the North Sea fields will be protected”. Naturally, this is the sort of sentiment you can generally go along with. However, having said that, this is an example of narrow trade unionism that simply looks at workers as labour-power - not as actual human beings that reproduce and want their children and grandchildren to live on this planet in a way that is sustainable, and supportive of human civilisation.
So it also seems appropriate to mention the closure last month of Britain’s last coal-power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar in Nottinghamshire, bringing to an end a 142-year history of coal-fired electricity. Should communists campaign against its closure? Yes, we would oppose mass sackings, of course - nor can we be indifferent to the trashing of historically established communities, which has happened in so many coal-producing areas since the 1960s. But campaigning to keep coal-powered stations open is an entirely different question altogether.
One might as well talk of reviving the charcoal burning industry, which was, of course, used by the Wealden iron industry in south-eastern England before the turn to coke and coal.
The charcoal to smelt the iron came from carefully managed coppices and the power was provided by watermills. Therefore the industry was eminently sustainable. The Weald produced the bar iron that was used to gate and fence St Paul’s Cathedral and all those ship’s cannons that allowed Britannia to rule the waves. There is still iron in abundance underneath what is now woods, forest and rolling green fields.
Power trend
As the last coal power station closes in Britain, it is reasonable to look at what is going on in China. The argument or excuse from Beijing would be that, given Britain industrialised using coal power from the 1800s or thereabouts, China too needs to industrialise as fast as possible - with its fellow travellers peddling various version of that line. But this approach is reductio ad absurdum: Britain pumped out a load of CO2, as did America, so objecting to China doing the same is either hypocritical or part of a pro-imperialist desire to keep down the ‘global south’. In reality, what China produces is consumed by Americans, Europeans and Brits, precisely because we do not live in two separate systems, or two different worlds. Birmingham used to be the workshop of the world, but now it is China. Nevertheless, we all consume the same stuff and live on the same planet.
Discussing the issue of carbon capture and all the rest of it, Socialist Worker recently warned about letting the market decide this question - saying “don’t trust Starmer and his carbon capture con”, which is correct.3 As said, we need to look after our common planet, as it is the only one we have got - if Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, then best of luck and enjoy the view. But that is not where our future as a species lies: it is here on planet Earth. Yet Socialist Worker goes on to say that, if you leave it to the market, that “risks letting gas and biofuels take its place”- which sounds very radical and anti-capitalist, but is actually a cheap line indicating that the writer of the piece had not really thought about it. Condemning capitalism and the market is quite right, of course - it would be an odd communist who took umbrage. But all the statistics show that in the here and now, not because of the quixotic technology of the future, solar and wind power is vastly cheaper than fossil fuels of any kind, not to mention biofuels and certainly nuclear energy, which is pure madness on every level.
Therefore, according to a new report by the International Renewable Energy Agency, the world added 473 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity last year, and four-fifths of it produces power more cheaply than fossil fuels do.4 This added capacity is roughly equivalent to 473 nuclear plants and produces electricity at prices that most fossil plants cannot hope to match, totally leaving behind the lumbering dinosaur that is the nuclear industry.
The global average cost of electricity from onshore wind fell to 3.3 cents per kilowatt-hour (three percent less than the year before) and utility-scale solar photovoltaic fell to 4.4 cents/kWh (12% less). Fossil-fuel prices rose in 2023 to 10 cents/kWh, says the International Renewable Energy Agency, which largely ignores nuclear power - that has been estimated to cost as much as 25-30 cents/kWh. As for battery storage, that has grown from 0.1 GWh gross capacity added in 2010 to 95.9 GWh in 2023. From 2010 and 2023, the costs of battery storage projects declined 89%, thanks to improved materials efficiency, improved manufacturing processes and economies of scale.
Clearly, meeting our energy needs and creating a sustainable planet requires planning: it cannot be left to the capitalists to put up wind farms and solar panels willy-nilly, while dreaming about making a quick buck. But the essential point is that this is not something we are hitting at from a crazy or utopian angle. Boris Johnson, before he became prime minister, said wind farms could not “pull the skin off a rice pudding” - which now looks profoundly stupid. As things stand today, Britain is powered going on for half by solar and wind power, and for all the worries of Socialist Worker, that is a trend obviously set to continue - barring a catastrophe such as the destruction of human civilisation.