Britain must spend £30bn to strip CO2 from atmosphere and hit net zero, experts warn
By Paul Homewood
h/t Doug Brodie
Britain must invest £30bn in a network of massive air cleansing systems designed to strip CO2 from the atmosphere if it is to reach net zero, a government-funded report has warned.
The “direct air carbon capture systems” would remove up to 48 million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year and then pump it into disused oil and gas reservoirs under the North Sea or Irish Sea.
Without such a scheme the UK will never reach its target of net zero emissions by 2050, according to the report by Energy Systems Catapult, a government-funded body that promotes innovation.
It also warns that direct capture will be essential if the UK is to maintain an aviation industry, because aircraft are unlikely ever to run entirely on sustainable fuels.
“Beyond 2040 we see few options to abate remaining emissions so use of direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) will be required,” it said.
“Direct air capture would collect 38-48 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2050. This technology appears to be essential to meeting net zero in all our scenarios and yet remains unproven at scale.”
Direct air capture plants would need to be built along the UK’s east coast, from East Anglia to Aberdeen, so that the CO2 captured could be pumped to storage sites under the North Sea, the study said.
The Climate Change Committee, which advises the Government, has described direct air capture as “a necessity, not an option”, for the UK to meet its net zero targets.
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman said removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was essential in helping the UK achieve energy security and independence.
The spokesman added: “The UK has one of the greatest CO2 storage potentials of any country in the world, with the North Sea having the potential to hold an estimated 78 billion tonnes. We are tapping into this potential by investing £20bn in carbon capture and storage, driving economic growth and supporting up to 50,000 jobs.
“We are also investing up to £100m in research and innovation for greenhouse gas removal technologies such as Direct Air Capture.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/28/britain-30bn-strip-co2-atmosphere-hit-net-zero/
If the Government has any backbone, it would throw this report in the bin, and assure the public it will not under any circumstances waste taxpayers’ money on green virtue signalling.
After all, if aviation emissions cannot be eliminated, this means the rest of the world will be in the same position, so why should we pay for something which will make no difference?
And as the report admits, they have no idea how or whether this daft idea will actually work. So they also have no idea of its cost – it might be £30bn, or it might be £300bn.
No sane government, (which would rule out one with Ed Miliband in charge!) should even contemplate going down this avenue.
Quite where DESNZ gets the idea that “removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was essential in helping the UK achieve energy security and independence” is a mystery! Indeed, these carbon capture devices won’t run on moonshine – they will need energy, and lots of it, in turn reducing our energy security.
And as one commenter points out, the report does no come from a “promoter of innovation”, but a govt funded climate change advocacy group:
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Pure insanity
Madness was my reaction.
So HS2 will cost “100 billion but the infinitely more complex series of co2 scrubbers will only cost a third of that? seems unlikely.
The Orwell quote “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.” seems most appropriate here. There is no understanding. of how they got the costs. Are there any plants doing large scale air capture? At least liquifying the gas to pump into the ground is known technology. Probably cost £30 billion just for pipelines and wells into one field.
What sickens me is that the government still subsidises and peddles this sort of report, and anything related to that. So the current wants to cut the number of civil servants. Well, close down the whole of the climate-related departments, entities and contracts by defunding those at a stroke of a pen!
Its £29 billion for a modern Version of Orwells Memory Hole so only £1 billion is needed for a non functioning CO2 scrubber
Experts? What kind of experts are we talking about? Clearly not people with any knowledge of physics or geological history!
Clearly experts in the modern day version of spinning seven different kinds of 5h1te into gold to make the Emperors Clothes!
These people are not just frauds…. this is a criminal intent to defraud the British Public.
The temperature readings on which the 1.2 degree temperature rise in the last 150 years is predicated are a joke. They have manipulated older readings downward, but the real problem is that most of the devices used to give the readings are situated in completely unsuitable places, and give excessive readings even when there is no underlying temperature change. The Atlantic multidecadel oscillation and its Pacific equivalent, overlaid by El Nino and La Nina explain what is going on much more clearly.
I miss Broadlands (whatever happened to him?) Because he would be along to remind us that as ONE PPM of CO2 is equivalent to eight billion tonnes (by mass), the 48 million tonnes is surely a very expensive drop in the ocean (or the pipeline under the ocean, in this case).
Slightly O/T – I am compiling a dossier of ridiculous UK Met Office weather station locations. This is an image of today’s latest finding.
https://www.google.com/maps/@51.1307546,-3.3496342,3a,37.5y,263.66h,75.26t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipMpX6_kQblV5HediI017l6Z7Z7kO3CpadLouU-G!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipMpX6_kQblV5HediI017l6Z7Z7kO3CpadLouU-G%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya121.709175-ro-0-fo100!7i12000!8i6000?coh=205409&entry=ttu
Van exhaust temperature recording at Nettlecombe (CIMO CLASS 5) Somerset. To put in context how absurd this station is, those who take the readings (it’s a manual site) can’t be arsed to bother a lot of the time as demonstrated in the “Remarks” in its data log here.
https://archive2.ceda.ac.uk/cgi-bin/midas_stations/station_details.cgi.py?id=1291&db=midas_stations
Mind you it is marginally better than the site it replaced where comments like “DUE TO THE SCREEN DOOR BEING LEFT OPEN ALL AIR TEMP VALUES HAVE BEEN DELETED” were common!
https://archive2.ceda.ac.uk/cgi-bin/midas_stations/station_details.cgi.py?id=1290&db=midas_stations
Really professional organisation this Met Office!
Fantastic photo Ray, hooray for Google for once. I wonder if there’s an equivalent one of the (alleged!) ice-cream van/tractor exhausts at Brogdale. Fished some of the local ‘farm’ produce (in a black bag) out of Westbrook yesterday morning, reminded me of the famous Doonesbury slogan for their weed farm ‘Z+Z Bud’, “Don’t be Google” (“sounds ethical but doesn’t over promise”).
https://searchengineland.com/doonesbury-comic-need-company-slogan-dont-google-193008
Love the comment in the log on yr last post: ‘Staff too busy (to take readings)’.
At the risk of going off on a tangent there is a rather worrying aspect displayed by this Nettlecombe fiasco of a site. The old (equally rubbish) site is still there and can be seen from google street view. Often these old sites continue recording parallel to the new ones but the data is not as openly published…..except when the Met Office feel the need!
In 2012 the late Tim Channon recorded the site of the RAF Wittering station and rated it CIMO Class 3 – (I would rate it worse than that.) The Met Office however claim the site is Class 1 BUT that is the new, very recent location some distance away. In 2022 when the Met Office needed as many bogus site readings as possible (all the “record” sites were extremely poor class 4 and 5s) They claimed Wittering was Class 1 and over 40°C – guess which site they used?????
Honest question: Do global temperatures follow the rise on CO2, OR, does CO2 follow a rise in global temperatures?
This simple question which I put to Copilot – answer:
The relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and global temperatures is a subject of extensive scientific research. The consensus among scientists is that there is a strong correlation between the two. Here’s a summary of the findings:
Uhmmm.
Exactly. If only somebody would start the ball rolling on “WHY?” instead of “HOW?”. Even critics of net zero concentrate on the cost and/or practicality instead of the fundamentals.
Temperature / CO2 proxy data clearly show there is little correlation between the two – there are periods in earths climate history when one is up, the other is down – AGW is an unproven highly politicised hypothesis that is really about wealth transfers from the masses to the globalist elites
Not correct. The evidence is unequivocal. There is NO correlation between the atmospheric concentration of CO2 and surface temperature. NONE.
The famous saw tooth graphs from ice cores that that world famous scientist AL Gore puppet misread (deliberately) shows a temperature increase predating an increase in CO2 by approximately 800 years NOT the other way around as the fraud suggested. When the ruler the put up against a graph is not even straight how can we believe anything these weasels say? Anyway, what the cores shows is degassing and re gassing of the oceans. Remember the Oceans contain a concentration of CO2 many times higher than the atmosphere.
One “interesting” aspect of the Klymutt charlatans is their obsession with using models not empirical data (when it exists). Have you ever wondered why? That is because models are built using user selected input which often is not real data. If you want to control outcome, simply control input. The other thing that the Klymutt charlatans and their mouthpieces do is treat model output as data. IT IS NOT!
There is a cardinal rule which applies right across all of the sciences. That rule is you NEVER EVER used modeled data when empirical data exists. Yet, this is what the Klymutt charlatans do repeatedly…ignore real data and use their fudged modeled data instead. Also the output of models is in the form of statistical probability. Do you ever hear the BBC explaining that? Of course not because then when they do one of their “oh no, it is worse than we thought” segments they are totally misusing the statistical output quoting one of the extremes without referencing the “most likely”. This is wilful fraud nothing less.
On a broader scale you may be interested to know we also have geological data which demonstrates no correlation whatsoever. How does 450 million years of data which says no correlation impress you? A comparison of work on paleo surface temperature by Scotese (1999) and paleo atmospheric CO2 concentration by Berner (2001) shows no correlation between atmospheric CO2 concentration and surface temperature over the past 550 million years. Further work by W Jackson Davis published in 2017 >>Climate 2017, 5, 76; doi:10.3390/cli5040076<< covering the same period ( The Phanerozoic) came to exactly the same conclusion.
This is the enormity of the fraud which is being perpetrated on the Western societies in particular because there exists no statistically significant empirical data of any kind obtained by a repeatable and falsifiable methodology which supports the CO2 temperature control knob claim.
No empirical data means no science QED! Explain your way out of that Greta!
Yet all we hear about is NET Zero and burying carbon…. they cannot even say carbon dioxide correctly! The absurd and wicked fools involved in this are too ignorant to understand that CO2 is the gas of life, and the source of the oxygen they (unfortunately) breath!
The first problem with ice ages is:
When CO2 concentrations were high the world cooled, and when CO2 was low the world warmed. This counter-intuitive temperature response strongly suggests that CO2 is not the primary feedback agent.
The second problem with ice ages is:
Ice ages are forced by increased Milankovitch insolation in the Northern Hemisphere (NH), but never by increased insolation in the Southern Hemisphere. If CO2 were the primary feedback agent interglacials could and would be forced by increased insolation in either hemisphere, but they are not. The fact that interglacials are only ever NH events, strongly suggests that surface albedo is the primary feedback agent (the great landmasses being in the NH), rather than CO2.
The third problem with ice ages is:
During an ice age, many NH Milankovitch maxima produce little or temperature response. Again, this would be unlikely if CO2 was the primary feedback agent, but it is to be expected if surface albedo was the primary feedback. High albedo ice sheets covered in fresh snow can and will reject the increased insolation from a NH Milankovitch maximum, resulting in little or no temperature response.
Unless, of course, the ice sheets are somehow covered in dust, thus reducing their albedo. Fortuitously, the northern ice sheets do indeed get covered in dust just before each and every interglacial. This is the topic of my ice age modulation paper – the counter-intuitive method of dust production, and its function as the primary feedback agent controlling interglacial warming.
The fourth problem with ice ages is:
The CO2 is a very weak feedback agent indeed. During an interglacial warming era, the CO2 feedback requires warming from decade to decade, to feedback-force temperatures into the next (warmer) decade. Unfortunately the CO2 feedback is only 0.007 W/m2 per decade, which is less energy than a bee requires to fly.
Conversely, reduced albedo ice sheets can absorb an extra 200 W/m2 every single annual year, when measured regionally. Clearly the albedo feedback is far stronger than the proposed CO2 feedback, and could indeed dissipate the vast northern ice sheets in about 6,000 years.
All of the above points strongly suggest that ice sheet albedo is the primary feedback agent modulating interglacials, rather than CO2.
Very simple really. Solubility of gases and other O level stuff. At 0c the Ocean holds twice the amount of CO2 as it does at 30c. As you warm a liquid you get evaporation. (If you lower temp enough CO2 forms a solid).
So when you chill your coke can (in my case sparkling wine!) and crack it open you get a moderate hiss. Warm that coke can to over 30c and the expanding CO2 spews out over the floor.
So its school kid stuff that rising temps cause more CO2 to be released (principally from water – the oceans hold a fair bit though alarmists dont know that)) Lowering temps see more CO2 absorbed into the oceans.
Temp controls CO2. No-one has shown CO2 controlling atmospheric temps.
This gets ever more loony. CO2 is essential for plant growth. Some agronomists think we could do with more!Cordially Ian Harris
And what happens to the CO2 from the 90% of the world’s nations that don’t have depleted oil fields in which it can be stored?
NET ZERO FOLLY
As most self respecting scientists know, man-made carbon dioxide has virtually no effect on the climate. It is a good gas essential to animals and plant life. Provided dirty emissions are cleaned up, we should be using our substantial store of fossil fuels while we develop a mix of alternatives including nuclear power to generate energy. There is no climate crisis, it has always changed and we have always adapted to it. In the Ordovician ice age atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 4000 ppm and have been 15 times higher than now. There was no industrial revolution then to be the cause . The present quantity of man-made carbon dioxide is insignificant compared with water vapour or clouds which comprise a vast majority of green-house gases. We have no control over the climate. Statistically we are overdue a period of cooling.The sun and our distance from it have by far the most effect. Most importantly, Net Zero (carbon dioxide) Policy will do nothing to change it. Countries like China, Russia and India are sensibly ignoring this and using their fossil fuels. They will be delighted at how the west is letting the power elites, mainstream media and government implement this Policy and the World Order Agenda 21, to needlessly impoverish us as well as causing great hardship and suffering.
We need CO2 to survive, what do people think makes the planet green. Absolutely insane!
Photosynthesis
6CO2 +6H2O +SUNLIGHT = C6H12O6 +6O2
Carbon dioxide +Water +Sunlight= Sugar +Oxygen
The plant converts the sugar into starch/cellulose C6H10O5, The starch we eat, it gets converted back to sugar by enzyme in saliva, the cellulose is basically wood.
Why an earth would anyone with even half a brain want to take the elixir of life gas out of our atmosphere. Burning fossil fuels in the last 200 years has actually been a huge benefit in terms of crop yields and greening of the planet.
A Govt funded body that benefits financially by promoting the climate alarmism, net zero nonsense – CO2 does NOT need removing from the atmosphere, indeed, we need much more of it – a recent study by 3 polish physicists has concluded that atmospheric CO2 has reached saturation point, ie, even if you were to double the atmospheric content to over 800ppm, it would have no effect on temperatures – the whole silly net zero, CO2 is evil stupidity is just a politicised wealth transfer from the masses to globalists, based on dodgy manipulated data and modelling to enforce the scam
See also Van Wijngaarden and Happer’s 2019 and [2020] Radiative Transfer Papers for Five Greenhouse Gases (‘Infrared Forcing by Greenhouse Gases’) [‘Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases’]. Brilliant work backed up by satellite readings of outgoing IR. Happer’s lectures erudite and entertaining, highly recommended (online).
Quite apart from the unsustainable costs in money and energy of capturing carbon dioxide from the air and pumping it underground, which themselves make this idea a non-starter, what about the impossibility of proving that the stored carbon dioxide actually stays underground?
If it slowly seeps back out, which to my mind isquite likely, how will you ever know that this is happening? Or maybe that doesn’t trouble the loons putting forward this idea – just capturing and apparently storing the CO2 is all about virtue-signalling and nothing else.
I suspect that some of these lunatics think there should be no CO2 in the atmosphere. Would be interesting to conduct a survey on their ideal ppm.
You are assuming they understand that CO2 is critical to carbon life on Earth, and that below 150ppm, death awaits.
My hunch is they don’t know that and only ‘know’ that CO2 is dangerous pollution that’s boiling the earth and must be removed.
Another 50,000 “Green” jobs created out of thin air, goodness gracious at this rate, we will have more “Green” jobs than workers to fill them.
However, Carbon Capture has not be proven at scale, nor have the costs for design, build and running been calculated, except for a rather exact £30billion with no supporting evidence, obviously this unconfirmed sum will be added to consumers bills as an ever growing Green Tax levy.
Let’s assume for one second that we grab “our” 48billion tonnes of CO2 (how will we know that it’s ours as it is in the atmosphere which circulates around the globe), do we place a large dome over the UK to stop others CO2 straying into our airspace?, but if we take out all this CO2 which we know is plant food, at some point quickly reached, the atmospheric CO2 will drop below 150ppm, which is death point for plant life>animal life>human life.
Jobs to achieve what? They’re just diggindg and filling in holes. At the end of all the spend zero production of benefit achieved. Total waste. Net zero equals zero production and probably negative production. Poverty beakons.
£30,000,000,000,000 / 50,000= £600,000 per job, then you have to pay these lucky people an annual salary, shall we say £40,000 as they are high value “Green” = £2,000,000,000; too much, let’s pay them £20,000= £1,000,000,000. Get the feeling that these “Green” jobs are rather expensive to the economy, oh well, Go Green, Go Broke.
Question is the £30billion (rolls of the tongue quite easily), a one off cost or is it £30billion each year?
Why?
I will say this again…
If they bury the CO2 in old coal mines or oil wells, what is to stop a well-blowout, and a vast Lake Nyos disaster.
A vast bank of ground-hugging CO2, could eliminate millions of people on the UK eastcoast or Dutch west coast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster
R
When the Egyptians and Mayans devoted huge economic resources to the construction of pyramids that served no economic purpose they did at least leave behind monuments for us to ponder.
Carbon capture will not build any gorgeous palaces. They will leave not a rack behind, vanished into thin air. Your revels will be ended.
it will be the farewell to the magic assumptions of green Prosperos.
Store vs disposal. They pick ‘store.’ Until it leaks out? Then they can do it all over again.
Gamecock can translate: “We are stupid.”
Is this an English English thing? Pissing money away is called ‘investing?’
Started with Blair and Brown (like nearly all bad ideas), think the Green New Deal in USA makes similar sorts of noises.
Hey! Great Terrific ! Whose CO2 are we going to scrub then? HOw will it get here, -another pipeline? Where will we put it all? How much are we going to charge the Customer after this great expenditure? Job for our USAF then ? Great business record in shipping, Road building, education & Health. etc.
To what end exactly? Presumably we will also erect an unassailable column of air above Britain that the other 99% of the World’s emissions will not impinge on our NetZero madness?
Henry’s Law will prevent any such attempt to ‘reduce’ co2.
A Department for Energy Security and Net Zero spokesman has said ‘Removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere was essential for the UK to meet its net zero targets’. But one wonders if this will have any effect at all on our Climate.
Energy Security Secretary Claire Coutinho proudly claimed that the UK is the first major economy to halve its emissions – i.e. over the period from 1990 to 2022. Although this particular Government Press Release only mentions Carbon (a black solid) it is in fact referring to Carbon Dioxide gas.
So here is the obvious question to Claire and all her friends in the Media – Since we have already reduced the UK output of this damaging gas, Carbon Dioxide, by HALF, have we seen a corresponding improvement in the Climate? If the answer is a NO, then why are we even considering removing even more of this gas with such a costly process?
best we build a 100mile high wall around the UK then so we don’t have foreign CO2 infiltrating our atmosphere.
This is not my work and apologies to whoever wrote it, I have no note of your name. It does make quite a number of important points:
We have inadvertently temporarily stalled, not stopped the occurrence of the next global extinction which will be caused not by too much CO2 as the climate zealots baselessly claim but by too little CO2 something which is not a claim because this interpretation is based on a wealth of empirical data.
What is the problem? Put simply, from evolution sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.
Evolution is a big roll of the dice.
About 160 million years ago a plethora of marine organisms evolved with the ability to sequestrate CO2 and combined with calcium to produce hard protective shells. When those organisms died their shells did not dissolve en mass because what are today’s incredible volume world wide of organic Shelly limestones. The problem is that the CO2 was taken out of the Carbon Cycle and not returned upon death to any great degree.
The consequences of this evolutionary event is that The Carbon Cycle has been out of sync now for 160 million years. In a gross sense there has been a linear decline in the atmospheric CO2 concentration since the Late Jurassic which you and I driving our SUVs have helped pause for a mere instant in geological time before it resumes. Mankind deserves to congratulate it’s self for that happenstance.
During the depths of the first part of the current Ice Age, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere fell to around 180ppm or put another way, 20ppm above the death of plants because photosynthesis is compromised at and below 160ppm.
The main take away from the oft promoted 800K years of ice core derived saw tooth temperature and CO2 concentration curves is not the fact that CO2 rise in the atmosphere follows temperature (not the other way around as is continuously being falsely claimed) but rather that the planet has diced with a global extinction eighth times during the last 800K years…. Do not take my word for it. Google ice core temperature data and look how close the CO2 values got to the 160ppm death line on eight occasions during the last 1 million years.
The simple empirical data based fact (not modelled ) is that right now at around 410ppm plants are still running on lean. The average atmospheric concentration of CO2 over geological time is 2500ppm which is where it was when the angiosperms we eat evolved. If I was asked to therefore choose an “optimum” level for CO2 in the atmosphere then I would choose 2500ppm citing geological precedent.
The current anti CO2 craze is NOT based in science but in ideology. They do not actually know what they are asking for because it is based not in science but pure ideology which needs a simple bogeyman for their moronic followers to latch onto. Sadly there are new recruits added in the West every single day to this ideology by means of the totally baseless thinly disguised left wing climate “education” which our children are receiving in schools across the whole of Western Civilization where socialism is promoted time and time again to children as young as 5 years old as the solution to everything.
Stranded asset, anyone?
A glimpse inside Dubai’s futuristic new airport, set to be the biggest on Earth (telegraph.co.uk)
“… set to be the biggest on Earth”
I will guarantee, that when all the costs are considered, the net CO2 produced by doing this scheme is much higher than any CO2 supposedly captured.
How can anyone coming up with absolute tripe like this ever be designated as an “expert”?
The window lickers are in charge.