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From Carbon Tracker
In December 2023 the UK outlined an ambitious CCUS strategy, aiming to capture 20-30 million tonnes of C02 per annum by 2030, backed by £20 billion in taxpayer funding. This strategy was based on the recommendations of the Climate Change Committee, published in The Sixth Carbon Budget in December 2020.
However Carbon Tracker has found that, since then, cost estimates for deploying CCUS have more than doubled, while the need for carbon capture could be much smaller. For example it estimated that the need for gas plants with CCUS could be one-third of earlier estimates due to the growth of renewables, battery storage and flexible technologies.
For example, it argued that plans to use CCUS to decarbonise steel production and gas-fired power plants should be abandoned, with both applications likely to be out-competed by cleaner alternatives. Tata Steel and British Steel are already moving away from plans to install CCUS at their UK facilities in favour of a move towards Electric Arc Furnaces, while hydrogen turbines are likely to be cheaper sources of flexible power generation than gas-CCS plants by 2030.
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Read the full post at Carbon Tracker.
