Ahead of the budget next week, HyNot is calling on Rachel Reeves to stop funding carbon capture and storage.
The campaign group, which is currently appealing the refusal of its legal challenge against the HyNet carbon capture and storage scheme, has written an open letter petitioning the chancellor to fill the £22billion black hole in public finances by scrapping the £22billion government subsidies for the HyNet and Net Zero Teesside carbon capture and storage schemes.
Open letter
Dear Rachel,
In your statement to the House of Commons in July last year, you announced a £22billion black hole in public finances. Three months later, the government pledged £22billion of public money to the HyNet and Net Zero Teesside carbon capture and storage (CCS) schemes.
Why is the government subsidising the fossil fuel industry? If CCS is such a great idea, why aren’t filthy rich polluters paying to clean up their own mess?
HyNet will carve a 37 mile long exhaust pipe through rural communities, agricultural land, watercourses, ancient woodland and designated habitat sites so polluters can carry on burning stuff. HyNet and its industrial partners will pump tens of millions of tonnes of climate wrecking carbon dioxide under the seabed, with no guarantee it’ll stay there, and turn Liverpool Bay into an industrial waste dump. CCS is just like landfill but under the sea.
CCS is dangerous, expensive, energy intensive and unproven at scale. Existing schemes have wasted vast sums of money and massively failed to meet their capture targets. CCS is a risky technofix and the Environmental Audit Committee has expressed concerns that government investment in CCS is a significant financial and delivery risk which could have negative long-term consequences and leave the public to pick up the bill.
CCS also enables the fossil fuel industry to produce blue hydrogen and greenwash it as ‘low carbon’ when it’s worse for the climate than gas. CCS and blue H₂ will prolong dependency on fossil fuels and block the energy transition to net zero.
The clean green solutions are to stop burning fossil fuels, invest heavily in renewable energy and grid infrastructure, introduce energy demand reduction measures and electrify industrial processes like cement, glass and steel manufacturing.
The government needs to rapidly bring down carbon emissions, but CCS is a false solution which will lock in fossil fuels and more emissions while lining the pockets of Big Oil with public money.
So Rachel, please stop funding carbon capture and storage and spend the money you’ll save on backing clean zero carbon solutions, creating thousands of jobs and building a green economy fit for the future.
Yours sincerely,
HyNot and the undersigned
Additional info
HyNet intends to produce what is known as blue hydrogen from fossil gas at the Stanlow refinery in Cheshire. The carbon dioxide emissions captured from the process, and from other local carbon intensive industries, will be piped along the North Wales coast to be stored under the seabed in Liverpool Bay.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is claimed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from industry and is being promoted and subsidised by the government. HyNet, located in North West England and North Wales, is one regional CCS cluster which is set to receive a share of £22billion in subsidies earmarked for CCS.
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