Carbon capture is a fig leaf for fossil fuel expansion | Letters

The predicted £264bn cost by 2050 could be even higher, plus renewables avoid a far higher total of emissions than can be captured, writes Andrew Boswell, while Simon Oldridge calls out vested interests Prof Myles Allen and colleagues, in their letter (12 July) on carbon capture and storage (CCS), propose licensing gasfields on condition that producers store an increasing proportion of “the carbon dioxide their products generate”. Their proposal only considers CO2. Methane is excluded by choice although it leaks throughout global fossil-fuel supply chains, including during extraction, processing, liquefaction and shipping. A growing academic literature, supported by satellite observations of major methane plumes, shows that these emissions can be very substantial, and are the dominant near-term climate impact for gas supplied as liquefied natural gas. The UN secretary general targeted these near-term climate impacts at London Climate Week, with his call to action on methane. Policymakers should treat this proposal with extreme caution as it does not deal with those impacts. The estimated £264bn cost of CCS to the UK by 2050 is derived from the Climate Change Committee’s own data an