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Home » UKCCSRC on the essential role of carbon capture and storage
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UKCCSRC on the essential role of carbon capture and storage

userBy userJuly 23, 2025No Comments16 Mins Read
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Leading experts from the UKCCSRC discuss the UK’s current carbon capture and storage (CCS) landscape, and how their network is accelerating deployment through research, collaboration, and policy support to help achieve climate targets.

As the UK intensifies efforts to meet its Net Zero ambitions, CCS is becoming an increasingly vital part of the national climate strategy. With its potential to decarbonise hard-to-abate sectors like steel, cement, and waste-to-energy, while also enabling carbon removal technologies, CCS is no longer a future concept but a present-day priority.

Delivering CCS at scale, however, requires more than just technology. It depends on strong networks, cross-sector collaboration, informed policymaking, and sustained public trust. In this context, the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Research Centre (UKCCSRC) plays a central role in bringing together researchers, industry leaders, and decision-makers to support the responsible and effective rollout of CCS across the country.

To find out more, we spoke to the UKCCSRC’s Deputy Director & ECR champion, Dr Jennifer Roberts (University of Strathclyde), and  Deputy Director & EDI Champion, Professor Mathieu Lucquiaud (University of Sheffield).

Could you please detail the current mission of the UKCCSRC and how you’re influencing CCS development and deployment in the UK?

Jennifer: One of the core roles of UKCCSRC is to serve as a network. Our activities bring together academics, industry, policymakers, NGOs – anyone working within the broad remit of CCS and climate action. We organise events, provide funding opportunities, and create platforms to showcase research through conferences, webinars and blogs. It’s all about connecting people and accelerating learning and collaboration.

Accelerating network development is key because scaling and deploying CCS in the right way and in the right places requires strong facilitation. Whether it’s connecting people or educating them on different parts of the CCS chain, that’s a major way we influence the sector. We also support policymakers by providing advice, and we offer CPD-certified training for those who need a foundational understanding of CCS. Overall, our mission is to keep people informed and connected in this rapidly evolving space.

Mathieu: We serve as a key point of engagement for the UK CCS community. In addition to the training courses, we engage with industry, regulators, and both national and local government. We’ve been active for almost 20 years – our 20th anniversary is later this year. We have a large membership: around 2,500 people, including around 400 academics. We also support early-career researchers, helping them transition from PhDs into the growing CCS industry.

For example, we’ve contributed to government task forces on CCS. Some of our members sit on the CCUS Council. We’ve worked with the Environment Agency to assess the state-of-the-art in post-combustion capture technology in the UK, to support permitting new facilities. We’re also involved in work that pushes the frontier of CCS deployment – finding ways to improve capture efficiency and reduce emissions as much as possible. On the capture side, we’ve collaborated with the National Audit Office to ensure public spending on CCS delivers value for money.

Jennifer: We also place a strong emphasis on early-career researchers. We run a programme to support the current and next generation of CCS professionals, building up the skills needed for future jobs that don’t even exist yet. We’re also engaged in international collaboration with partners in the Netherlands, Australia, and China. Recently, we ran a webinar series with other European CCS organisations, and we’re planning similar initiatives with global partners.

After 20 years of operating in a changing landscape, we’ve learned a lot. We’re eager to share those lessons on how to run a successful network, support collaboration, and foster early-career development. Few research communities have this kind of longevity, and that gives us unique insights to contribute to the wider sustainability and Net Zero conversation.

How essential is CCS to the UK’s Net Zero goals, and where do we currently stand with deployment?

Mathieu: In short, CCS is absolutely essential for achieving Net Zero in the UK. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that without CCS, decarbonising the economy becomes significantly more expensive. We need CCS for sectors that can’t be decarbonised with renewables or efficiency alone, such as cement, steel, and energy-from-waste. You can’t replace these with a wind turbine or a solar panel.

We also need CCS for power plants that back up renewables. Because the UK is an island, we require flexible power generation, like gas-fired plants, to step in when wind or solar aren’t producing. If we want to decarbonise and keep the lights on, those plants must have CCS. Beyond Net Zero, our long-term goal is to go net negative – to actively remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. CCS supports that, too, either by storing biogenic carbon or through direct air capture with geological storage. The infrastructure we’re building now will serve both current mitigation and future removal strategies.

What are the most promising CCS technologies, and what challenges do we face, particularly with infrastructure?

Jennifer: There are definitely challenges across the whole chain – capture, transport, and storage. But often, people assume the biggest hurdles are technical. While there are still improvements to be made, especially around cost, efficiency, and resilience, the real barriers now are economic and policy-related.

The key question is: Who pays? How do we create viable business models? We’re asking how to incentivise CCS so that the biggest polluters don’t end up being the main financial beneficiaries. The UK has been leading efforts to build hub-and-cluster models and develop the supporting policy frameworks. There’s precedent for this kind of chain-based system in sectors like oil and gas or cement. But CCS is different because you don’t currently make money from storing CO₂ underground. So we need economic models that reflect the environmental value of what we’re doing.

That seems to be the wider issue with climate initiatives – there’s no immediate financial return, but the long-term value is immense?

Mathieu: Exactly. Society bears the cost, and we still haven’t fully resolved who should pay – the electricity consumer, the cement buyer? In the UK, we’ve made progress. The government has put serious funding on the table, and we’re now seeing final investment decisions (FIDs) on multi-billion-pound projects. But CCS isn’t flashy. It’s essential, like the sewage system. We paid for that in the 19th century and still use it today. CO₂ transport and storage are similar. It’s long-term infrastructure we’ll rely on for decades.

© shutterstock/Oksana Bali

As for technology, I’ve been in CCS research for 20 years, and while there’s still innovation happening, we’re past the exploratory phase. About 80–90% of current projects are using solvent-based post-combustion capture. It works, it’s well understood, and once we build a few, we’ll benefit from cost reduction through scaling. Other countries – Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands – are using the same technology. The UK isn’t going it alone. In fact, we’ve had one operational plant – Tata Steel captures CO₂ for pharmaceutical use. We’re now looking to scale that up by 100 times or more.

So the technology is mature. It’s now about scaling up and improving costs?

Jennifer: I think the technology is ready to deploy right now, but the real challenges will come with scaling up. Mathieu spoke about the need not just for CCS today, but for it to continue playing a role beyond 2050 and well past 2100. And when I talk about CCS here, I mean it in the broader sense – both for emissions mitigation and for carbon removals. That means we’re talking about growing an entire new sector, and with that growth will come new challenges. One area where we may see these challenges emerge is in the subsurface storage of CO₂.

We might understand how a reservoir behaves when injecting at one or two points, but when we start injecting at multiple sites across a storage basin, things become more complex. The UK has several offshore storage basins, and if we begin using multiple sites within each one, we can get issues like pressure interactions. That can limit how much CO₂ we’re actually able to store. While we have a good understanding of the technology and a pretty strong grasp of our storage potential, we’ll learn a lot more once we actually start injecting CO₂. That’s when we’ll begin to see how the rocks really behave.

We’re already doing this globally. There are CO₂ storage projects that have been injecting into the subsurface for decades. But what we haven’t done yet is deploy CCS at scale, across multiple sites, and at a national level. Add to that the possibility of accepting CO₂ from other countries because the UK has storage capacity that they might not have, and you start to see additional challenges on the horizon.

There’s still a critical role for innovation and research, not just now, but as we continue to scale up the sector. But we need to build and deliver projects now, even as we continue to innovate. At the same time, we also need to be innovating in other areas of society and industry. That means things like designing out waste, or reducing our reliance on materials like steel, which is a key sector that CCS will help decarbonise.

How much research has been conducted into the UK’s storage capacity?

Jennifer: I’ll answer that directly, but there’s also an interesting angle around how the wider public might feel about storing carbon from other countries in UK assets. We don’t yet fully know how people will feel about this, especially at the point of deployment. Although there is ongoing research to inform fair and responsible deployment, public attitudes, both locally and nationally, are still largely unknown.

Now, on the geological storage question: the UK is actually incredibly advanced in terms of understanding its subsurface storage potential. That’s largely thanks to our history with the oil and gas industry. Although production is now in decline, we’ve drilled a huge number of wells, so we have a detailed understanding of the rock formations offshore and onshore. Many other countries don’t have that advantage – they haven’t characterised their subsurface as well and therefore don’t know the full extent of their own storage capacity.

We’ve developed detailed storage atlases, which are continually being updated as we learn more. But it’s important to understand that the subsurface is inherently uncertain. You can assess how a rock formation might behave when CO₂ is injected into it, but you’re often doing that based on only a few wells, even though you’re dealing with a very large formation. That said, we’re used to engineering our way through uncertainty. If the subsurface behaves differently than expected, we can test, adapt, and optimise the way we inject CO₂. It’s not a case of finding out something isn’t quite right and having to abandon the project. We adjust.

Still, it’s true that you only really understand how the subsurface behaves once you start injecting. Based on current knowledge, we have a good handle on the UK’s storage capacity. In fact, we have more capacity than we need for our projected emissions, which opens up the possibility of importing CO₂ from other countries. But again, this raises another question: how will the geology respond when you’re injecting CO₂ in multiple locations, at different depths, over the next 100 years or more, well beyond 2100? The UK is in a good position here. We understand our subsurface better than many countries, though others are catching up. Still, any geoscientist will tell you: you never truly know the subsurface until you start injecting.

How important is it to build public trust in this technology, especially in the areas where these projects will be based? Most people are familiar with renewable energy technologies, but carbon capture is less understood. How do we change this?

Mathieu: That’s mainly because we haven’t built any CCS facilities yet. Once we do, people will be able to see the pipelines, the infrastructure, the sites, and that will help build understanding. Right now, there are a lot of myths and misconceptions about CCS. In the UK, we’re planning to deploy CCS in industrial regions – places with core manufacturing, skilled jobs, and high-value economic activity. By adding CCS to these industries, we’re giving them a future in the UK. Without it, we’d probably end up relocating those industries abroad to cut emissions. So, CCS is also about retaining jobs and economic value at home.

Jennifer: Knowledge of CCS in the UK is extremely low, and that’s not unique to us. Globally, general awareness of CCS is very limited. There are lots of reasons for this. First, there just aren’t that many live projects. Second, CCS isn’t a single technology – it includes a wide range of applications: for cement, steel, gas, bioenergy (which offers negative emissions), and even direct air capture. Each of those comes with different implications, and people may feel differently depending on the source of the CO₂. In the UK, we’re developing a cluster approach, where multiple CO₂ sources share the same transport and storage infrastructure. So, CCS should be thought of as a sector, not just a series of standalone technologies.

Now, public trust is a really big issue. There’s a difference between trust in the technology and trust in the developer or system delivering it. Take wind turbines, for example. UK public opinion has generally been supportive of wind energy since the 1990s. But when a wind farm is proposed in a specific area, local opposition can be strong. So, it’s often a case of: “wind power is good, but not here,” or “the technology is fine, but I don’t trust the company building it.”

It’s the same with CCS. People may trust the idea in theory but be sceptical of the companies, the planning process, or the organisations that might profit from it. That’s where public engagement really matters. We also need more research into how people in specific local communities feel about CCS, especially those near CO₂ sources, rather than the transport or storage sites. These developments will impact people living, working, and travelling nearby.

And while there are lessons from other energy technologies, like how people accepted gas pipelines, we can’t assume it’ll be the same with CO₂ pipelines. It’s a different risk perception. Ultimately, people care about more than money or jobs. They care about their sense of place, community values, and the future – both theirs and the next generation’s. It’s great to see more research emerging in this area. What we need now is to put that research into practice to design and deliver CCS projects that align with the broader goals of sustainable, thriving local communities.

How would you assess this government’s support for the technology?

Mathieu: I think it’s been a major shift. If we’d had this conversation a year ago, it would’ve felt very different. The government has really stepped up. In the autumn, they put £21.7bn on the table. We’ve had FIDs for a transport and storage network at Teesside, a new gas-fired power station with capture at Teesside, and for transport and storage in Merseyside.

During the Spending Review, an additional £9bn was committed for capital spend on CCS. Hundreds of millions more were allocated to help two more clusters in the northeast of Scotland (connecting to the Central Belt) and Humberside prepare for development. The government has stated that it intends to make FIDs on those clusters within this parliament, provided the projects offer good value for money.

We’ve also seen funding from the National Wealth Fund to support the Peak Cluster – a grouping of cement and lime industries in the Peak District. This will link them to another cluster via pipeline. To me, it feels like all the pieces are finally coming together. Could it be faster? Sure. But these are generally positive developments.

What we need now is more allocation of funds for capture projects. Right now, we have a couple of clusters, but only one capture project. We need to fill those pipelines with CO₂, meaning we need energy-from-waste plants, cement plants, and hydrogen projects to feel confident enough to invest in abatement. So yes, it’s positive, but we need to keep pushing forward.

Jennifer: Alongside all those announcements, we’ve also seen a raft of policy consultations. CCS spans many sectors, and each needs tailored mechanisms – there’s no one-size-fits-all policy. They’ve been working on detailed market guidelines, and we’ve seen a lot of activity in policy development. So yes, things could always go faster, but compared to previous years, it’s never moved this quickly.

There are still challenges – developers are dealing with complex systems – but the trajectory is good. The key now is making sure it’s sustainable. If we only build the projects already announced, we’ll fall short of our climate goals. We need a framework for continuous growth in CCS, both economically and politically.

Looking ahead 10 to 15 years, what does a successful CCS rollout look like for the UK, and how do we get there?

Mathieu: In the next five years, it’s critical that the first CCS projects in the UK are built successfully and function well. These first projects will set the tone for the whole industry. They need to succeed. Ten years from now, success means we have multiple CCS clusters, with facilities capturing and storing CO₂ from power, waste, cement, steel, lime, and hydrogen. All the sectors that need to decarbonise should be active participants.

We want to see momentum, not just completing the currently announced projects, but building many more. We want a thriving industry, with thousands of jobs, where someone starting their career today could build their entire profession in CCS. We also want to see CO₂ removal projects – pulling CO₂ directly from the atmosphere – starting to appear. The UK has a target for this by 2030, and we want to hit it.

Jennifer: CCS projects are large-scale infrastructure. They take time to plan, permit, and build responsibly. When we talk about accelerating CCS, we’re not saying a project should be approved and completed in two years. But we do want the rate of deployment to increase and the planning process to become more efficient. So success means ongoing development – a visible, growing pipeline of projects that keep coming online, helping us meet Net Zero.

A successful CCS sector is one that is:

Environmentally safe and resilient
Able to handle technical and financial shocks
Aligned with local identities and values
Embedded in places, not imposed on them

It should fit naturally into the communities it serves. And, ideally, it would just quietly do its job, like the decarbonisation of the electricity grid. It works. It’s not disruptive. People trust it. We’ll still need strong regulation and accountability, but if things go right, CCS becomes something people don’t need to worry about – it’s just part of how the UK works.


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