Carbon captives | 7 April 2012

The government’s desire for a ‘green economy’ has become such an obsession that it has begun to override common sense. This week, the Department for Energy and Climate Change invited bidders to apply for £1 billion of public funding for a commercial-scale carbon capture and storage project. The money will be used, we are told, to extract carbon dioxide from the chimneys of a large power station, condense it and pump it 150 miles out into the North Sea to be buried in the chambers of an empty oil well.

The department justifies this expenditure by claiming that by the next decade carbon capture will be an industry worth £6.5 billion a year to Britain. It is a preposterous figure, quoted by officials without any suggestion as to how it was arrived at.

If anyone outside government really believed that carbon capture was a viable business proposition there would be plenty of private investors wanting to risk their money on it.