Chris Packham urges UK chancellor to cut £24bn carbon capture plan

CCSA: supply-chain contracts could support about 350 UK companies and 5,500 construction jobs

Ahead of this week’s budget, Chris Packham urged the UK chancellor to cut government plans to spend £24bn on carbon capture and storage. The naturalist and broadcaster led an 11th-hour appeal to the Treasury to scale back the government’s “exorbitantly expensive” support and redirect the money toward heat pumps and other green schemes that could reliably cut emissions and lower household energy bills.

Packham said the government had earmarked £24bn for a series of carbon capture and storage projects developed by large oil companies, including BP and the Norwegian state oil company Equinor. He said the UK’s planned spending was more than the combined planned spending of the US, the EU, Norway and Japan. “CCS is a tech fairytale,” he said. “It should be a national embarrassment that the UK is pumping more taxpayer money into it than any other country in the world. This budget is a chance to put things right.”

Martin McCluskey, the parliamentary undersecretary at the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, said the government remained committed to carbon capture. He told an industry event this month that fiscal pressures may require decisions on the pace of the industry’s development.

The Carbon Capture and Storage Association said the UK’s first projects had already awarded more than £4bn in supply-chain contracts, which could support about 350 UK companies and 5,500 construction jobs. Mark Sommerfeld, the association’s UK director, said, “Pulling back now would undermine investor confidence, risk leaving infrastructure underused and deepen industrial decline.” He said the budget must honour existing commitments, turning current progress into “lasting growth, energy security and reindustrialisation.”

The intervention came as the government reportedly prepared to reduce grants available to households seeking to replace gas boilers with electric heat pumps. The report described the shift as crucial to cutting the carbon emitted when heating buildings. Heating buildings accounts for around a fifth of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

Packham called on the government to safeguard funding promises “that empower households to lower bills” rather than “bankrolling exorbitant expensive projects with ludicrously uncertain results.” A caption accompanying the report attributed to Packham the statement that the technology provided “ludicrously uncertain results.”

The leaders of many economies have backed carbon capture technology designed to trap carbon dioxide from fossil-fuel infrastructure before it enters the atmosphere. Proponents say piping the gas into underground storage could provide a permanent climate solution for industries unable to replace fossil fuels with cleaner alternatives. Although there are instances where the technology has worked successfully, many high-cost projects have struggled to progress, and many examples have produced carbon savings far less than expected.

Green groups have feared that fossil-fuel companies promoted carbon capture to prolong fossil-fuel use. Packham said failure to rein in the planned spending “would be yet another strong signal that this government is putting big oil above people and the planet.”

Aled Dilwyn Fisher, a senior researcher at Oil Change International, said: “It’s worrying that spending on climate is being cut in favour of defence, but cutting support for proven climate solutions while continuing to bankroll unreliable carbon capture projects would add insult to injury. “This budget should be an opportunity to put public money where it can make a real difference to the climate and help cut people’s energy bills, rather than continuing to gamble billions on the fossil fuel industry’s latest expansion plan.”

Rosie Hampton, a campaigner at Friends of the Earth Scotland, said over the summer that the government’s climate response was being built on “fantasy plans about turning the North Sea into Europe’s carbon dumping ground.” She said politicians should instead focus on “climate solutions that will improve people’s lives, such as warm homes, better public transport and decent green jobs.”

Work has begun on the UK’s first carbon capture and storage projects at the East Coast Cluster near Teesside and Humberside in north-east England, and at the HyNet Cluster near Merseyside and north Wales in north-west England.

The second phase of the government’s CCS support plan includes £200m for the Acorn project in Aberdeenshire, alongside £80m from the Scottish government. A report photograph shows the then energy secretary Ed Miliband at the Acorn project in Aberdeenshire, one of the CCS projects due to receive government funding, in summer last year.

The government was contacted for comment.