Magical realism is a literary genre that blends fantastical elements into a rational setting, often blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. The UK Government’s announcement this week to commit almost £22bn to two carbon capture projects is at best controversial. 
Carbon capture, utilisation and storage – CCUS – has been on the agenda for years. Actually decades. Initially known as simply carbon capture and storage (CCS), a few commercial projects were built in the USA in the 1980s which demonstrated the potential for geological CO₂ storage – capturing emissions at source (from the processing system the crude oil goes through or even directly from chimney stack or flare pipe) and pumping the gas into depleted subsurface oil reservoir rocks. The oil industry saw the technology as a way to enhance production from older oil and gas fields – known as Enhanced Oil Recovery or EOR - when natural pressure was slowing down. One of the best known is ExxonMobil’s Shute Creek plant in Wyoming, operating since 1986, where carbon dioxide is captured during gas processing, and the company sells the captured CO₂ for enhanced oil recovery in the surrounding area. 
However, the deployment of carbon capture to simply remove carbon from the atmosphere at scale is still an unproven technology. The world’s biggest carbon capture plant is Petra Nova in Texas, which cost $1 billion to build, facilitated by the availability of suitable storage sites, government grants, and tax credits that supported the project’s financing. The site – a coal mining plant - came onstream in 2017, but famously missed its carbon capture target by at least 800,000 tons before shutting down for three years in 2020. These figures also exclude emissions from the natural gas turbines used to power the facility and from the oil that much of the captured CO₂ was in fact used to help enhance extraction from a nearby oilfield. 
 
In the UK there is a trail of lost green causes. Carbon capture was a manifesto promise when David Cameron became UK Prime Minister in 2010, when he pledged that the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition he led would be ‘the greenest government ever’. An announcement of a £1billion competition for a large-scale trial CCS plant seemed to demonstrate the commitment was for real. Until in 2016, six months before the funding was to be awarded, the scheme was scrapped - the government cited that the CCS development competition was always “subject to affordability”. 
 
Earlier this year, Mark Jacobson, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University, and Director of its Atmosphere/Energy Program, summed up the fraught relationship between renewable energy and carbon capture technologies - “It’s always better to eliminate emissions with renewable energy than to use it to try and take carbon dioxide out of the exhaust stream of a fossil fuel power plant”. His three key reasons being it’s an unproven technology at scale (alluding specifically to the Petra Nova example), carbon capture projects divert critical funding away from carbon-free energy projects like wind, solar, and geothermal, and carbon capture technology is both energy and capital intensive. According to the IEA (the International Energy Agency), even if their performance and reliability improved, the carbon capture technologies necessary to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C by mid-century would require 26,000 terawatt hours of electricity and $3.5 trillion in investments per year. 
 
The natural engine of carbon capture is already in our grasp – and has always been part of Earth’s operating system. Plants comprise a major element of the carbon cycle, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere storing it in the roots, stems, and leaves, and convert it into cellulose, a carbohydrate that supports plant growth. A hectare of lightly managed broadleaf woodland absorbs about 1.3 tons of CO₂ per year. Grassland can absorb between 1.5 and 20 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year depending on a variety of factors (soil type, grazing etc). The Amazon rain forest, known as the lungs of the world for good reason, soaks up a quarter of all the CO₂ absorbed on Earth. The amount absorbed today, however, is 30% less than it was in the 1990s because of deforestation. Close to a fifth (20%) of the Amazon has been destroyed over the past fifty years, and some scientists say the tipping point, or the point at which the forest's tropical climate dries out, is between 20 and 25 percent removal of the plant and vegetation cover. 
 
And then the soils that support plant life are incredible carbon sinks – good soil health and land management will ensure that carbon is effectively sequestered, and crucially then stays there. Deforestation and poor agri-practices are a malevolent mix, and the increases in global temperatures are creating the situation where the melting of permafrost and the release of the carbon captured in those frozen soils is an impending disaster. Lying under the Arctic ice lies a carbon-rich environment built up over thousands of years, where plants have absorbed carbon dioxide through photosynthesis before being buried under snow and ice during the winter season, becoming part of the soil, and then remaining in cryogenic limbo. If this perennially frozen ground thaws – happening now as a result of climate change – these ancient plants are uncovered, alongside plant-eating microbes that break them down, releasing the two main climate-warming greenhouse gases: CO₂ and even more potent methane. 
 
Reaction to the UK Government’s funding decision has been swift. The Conservative former minister Andrew Murrison said the Chancellor’s decision to “magic” up money to fund the projects is surprising due to her recent focus - constantly repeated to the press and media - on financial “black holes” which, somewhat ironically, are said to amount to £20 billion. Dale Vince, founder of green energy provider Ecotricity and a major donor to the Labour party, has stated publicly that it's a mistake and CCS doesn't work commercially anywhere in the world. The think tank Funding the Future (formerly Tax Research UK) considers this move to give large scale financial support to carbon capture absurd. In their response they stated that effective carbon capture and storage technology has been talked about for decades. We still do not have it. The number of plants operating in the world is limited, costs are very high, and outcomes are variable, to say the least. In their opinion, all this is motivated by the desire of the oil companies to keep burning their output, creating further increase in global warming. 
 
And incidentally, ten million pensioners will find it absolutely extraordinary that this Government has managed to find over £20 billion, when they can’t find £1 billion to fund the winter fuel allowance putting a significant number of older people directly into fuel poverty and with serious health challenges over the coming winter months. 
 
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