Ross Clark Ross Clark

Carbon captives

Why is the government wasting a billion on technological pie in the sky?

While waiting for the comprehensive spending review, I passed the time watching two clips from British Pathé newsreels of the late 1940s. One featured Welsh housewives moaning about Stafford Cripps’s budget — one so angry at the cut in cheese rations that she threatened to shoot the Labour chancellor. The other clip, in characteristically uplifting tones, unveiled the Bristol Brabazon — the elephantine passenger plane with wings longer than Waterloo Bridge which was supposed to bolster the British aeronautical industry. A single phrase stands out as the camera fixes on mechanics carefully removing the chocks for its maiden flight: ‘You don’t take any chances with £12 million of taxpayers’ money.’

It is a laughable untruth. No matter how grim its austerity programme, no government can resist throwing money at technological pies in the sky. It was almost uncanny after the newsreels to watch George Osborne take a billion in child benefit from the pockets of families — and then splash it instead on a demonstration project into carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology.

Who, presented with one of those wonderful popular science magazine diagrams, could object to a bung to help British industry take a lead in this promising technology? After all, it’ll enable us to carry on burning oil and coal yet cutting our carbon emissions in the process, right? And it looks beautifully simple. You suck carbon dioxide from a power station chimney and, with the aid of solvents liquefy it, pump it out to sea through a pipeline and bury it several thousand feet down in one of the now-empty rock chambers whence the oil or gas came in the first place. Pumped into the right place, the CO2 might even help force out more oil and gas, extending the life of North Sea oil and gas fields.

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