UK spending on ‘fairytale’ carbon capture tech is a national embarrassment, chancellor told

UK spending on ‘fairytale’ carbon capture tech is a national embarrassment, chancellor told Chris Packham says £24bn earmarked for projects with ‘ludicrously uncertain results’ should be redirected to help lower bills and cut emissions

Campaigners are calling on the chancellor to cut the government’s £24bn spending plans for “fairytale” carbon capture technologies in favour of funding green schemes that can reliably cut emissions and lower energy bills.

The environmentalist Chris Packham is leading an 11th-hour appeal for the Treasury to use this week’s budget to scale back the government’s “exorbitantly expensive” support for carbon capture, which is now more than the planned spending for the US, the EU, Norway and Japan combined.

He said it was a “national embarrassment” that the government had earmarked £24bn to support a series of carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects developed by big oil companies, including BP and the Norwegian state oil company Equinor, and urged ministers to “put things right”.

“CCS is a tech fairytale,” the naturalist and broadcaster 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.”

The intervention comes as the government reportedly plans to reduce the grants available to households hoping to swap their gas boiler for an electric heat pump . This shift is considered crucial to cutting the carbon emitted when heating buildings, which makes up 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 exorbitantly expensive projects with ludicrously uncertain results”.

The leaders of many economies have backed carbon capture technology designed to trap the emissions from fossil fuel infrastructure before they are released into the atmosphere. Proponents believe that piping carbon dioxide into underground storage could provide a permanent climate solution for industries that are 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 there are many examples where carbon savings have proved to be far less than expected. Green groups fear the technology has been promoted by fossil fuel companies to prolong the use of fossil fuels .

Packham said a failure to rein in the planned CCS 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.