Rishi Sunak now sees a future for fossil fuels in Britain

The location of Rishi Sunak and Grant Shapps’s net zero relaunch today shows there has been a change of emphasis since the PM set up the Department for Energy Security and Climate Change last autumn.

Whereas Boris Johnson might have sought to make such an announcement at a wind farm or solar farm, today’s relaunch took place at Culham in Oxfordshire, the site of Britain’s nuclear fusion research facility. Fusion is the holy grail of carbon-free energy which even enthusiasts admit is decades away from being commercialised, if it can be at all. But it is a hint that the government is no longer going to try to power Britain with wind and solar energy alone. A competition to pick out the most promising modular nuclear reactor designs – for further funding and development – is one of the strands of today’s announcements.

The most eye-catching initiative is carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS). In his recent budget Jeremy Hunt announced a remarkable £20 billion of investment in CCUS projects. Now we learn that eight ‘clusters’ of projects are planned (although they won’t include Drax, the woodchip-burning power station in South Yorkshire whose shares have dived this morning in response to the news it has lost out on government backing).

Compared with the £240 million the government has made available to develop its ‘hydrogen economy’, this is a vast sum. Today’s document, ‘Powering Up Britain’, doesn’t quite spell it out, but the quest for CCUS signals that the government has changed its mind and now sees a future for fossil fuels. The whole point of CCUS, after all, is to suck out from the air carbon dioxide which has been produced by burning fossil fuels. As things stand, the government remains committed to removing all fossil fuels from electricity production by 2035, banning petrol and diesel cars, as well as new gas boilers, by the same date and pushing for existing gas boilers to be replaced by electric heat pumps at the rate of 600,000 a year. But what if we had a CCUS industry that was removing carbon from the atmosphere at the same rate it was being pumped in? The objections to burning fossil fuels would theoretically disappear. We could, say, continue to use gas power plants to back up intermittent wind and solar – and eliminate the need to find some way of storing vast amounts of energy.

That is not, however, how many green campaigners see it. Anticipating today’s announcement, 700 scientists and campaigners have written to Sunak demanding that no new oil and gas licences be granted. They complain that CCUS is no solution because it has ‘yet to be proved at scale’. They are right on that point – although the same is true of numerous other technologies which have been floated as possible ways of getting to net zero, and which are regularly advocated by some of the signatories. One suspects a bit of ideology creeping in: fossil fuels have become a great bogeyman, and nothing will make them acceptable.

The truth is, if the world is going to get anywhere close to net zero, CCUS will have to be used – because the process emissions from steel-making, cement-making, fertilizer-manufacturing and agriculture are going to be extremely difficult to address. Yet the government is taking an enormous gamble with its £20 billion. A decade ago, David Cameron launched a similar initiative, involving the investment of a more modest £1 billion in a CCUS demonstration plant. But in 2015 the scheme was abandoned, shortly before the expected announcement of who had won the bid. The government on that occasion came to the conclusion that CCUS was too much of a unicorn to take a risk with. Question is: what has changed now?