Britain’s Quixotic Carbon Capture Crusade

The tech has flopped everywhere else

There is a certain tragicomic quality to Britain’s current climate policy. Having long proclaimed itself a “climate leader” on the world stage, the United Kingdom is now preparing to stake tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on technologies that have failed everywhere else. At the centre of this quixotic crusade is carbon capture and storage (CCS), with a special emphasis on its most extravagant and least viable variant – direct air capture (DAC). The problem is simple: CCS has an abysmal track record, DAC is even worse and no commercial project anywhere in the world has succeeded in delivering on the promises made with such fanfare.

And yet, here we are.

The Times reports that Energy Secretary Ed Miliband is negotiating with Swiss firm Climeworks to develop Britain’s first DAC plant under the Government’s HyNet cluster. The proposal – code-named Silver Birch – would join a £21.7 billion CCS programme, with £9.4 billion earmarked for just the next four years.