Mighty growth from Scotland's carbon capture Acorn could prove elusive

Ministers should focus efforts on bringing down energy costs to reverse economic decline

Industry leaders will meet at the Offshore Energies UK conference in Aberdeen next week in the face of growing opposition towards the pace of the “just transition” away from fossil fuels.

It seems barely a day goes by without another nail being hammered in the coffin of British industry, with the soaring cost of energy invariably the common denominator.

Last week, 400 workers at bus manufacturer Alexander Dennis were told their jobs are at risk. It is a further blow to the Falkirk area after a similar number of redundancies caused by the recent closure of Grangemouth oil refinery.

The oil refinery at Grangemouth has now closed | PA

Labour has accused the Scottish Government of exacerbating the site’s difficulties by ordering buses from coal-powered China, which can produce them far cheaper than we can - along with wind turbines, solar panels and pretty much everything else.

Earlier this month, researchers at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen forecast there could be 400 job losses a fortnight in the North Sea oil and gas sector until the early 2030s.

And it is fair to say far more jobs are being lost in oil and gas, chemicals, steel, the auto industry and manufacturing in general than are being created in wind and solar.

The drive towards heavily subsidised, unreliable, low density “renewables”, which need to be backed up with reliable energy, has also been blamed for throwing Britain’s grid off balance, greater dependence on imported power, a countryside increasingly scarred by turbines and pylons, and energy costs that are four or five times higher than in countries such as the US.

An inconvenient truth

The green energy jobs bonanza that politicians of all stripes have been promising for decades has failed to materialise.

Confronted with this inconvenient truth, green energy enthusiasts have in recent years been reduced to mouthing vague bromides about batteries and hydrogen contingent upon scientific breakthroughs that, like all those green jobs, are just around the corner, or over the next hill.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves put some wind in their sails with the announcement in her Spending Review this month of £200 million for the Acorn carbon capture and storage project at St Fergus in Aberdeenshire.

Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband on a visit to St Fergus in Aberdeenshire to welcome funding for the Acorn project confirmed in the Spending Review | PA

Writing in this newspaper ahead of next week’s conference, OEUK chief executive David Whitehouse explained: “Acorn will capture carbon from high-emission sectors like glass, cement and power generation, compress it, and store it deep beneath the North Sea in depleted oil and gas reservoirs. A repurposed network of more than 200 miles of pipeline will transport these emissions for storage.”

This exercise, according to Whitehouse, will support around 10,800 construction jobs and create up to 4,700 long-term roles.

But critics question whether carbon capture and storage has been proven successful on such a scale.

And a growing number of politicians are backing away from the full-throated commitment to the uncompromising environmental ambitions advocated by the likes of Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband.

The green blob may wince each time Reform UK’s deputy leader Richard Tice utters his well-worn “net stupid zero” jibe, but a growing section of the population appears to share his dim view of the entire project.

The UK’s 2050 target was passed into law under the Tories, in the dying days of Theresa May’s government, and the agenda continued under her successor Boris Johnson.

But current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has declared net zero by 2050 “impossible” and called for an end to the “windfall tax” on oil and gas profits deterring North Sea investment.

Politicians ‘got it wrong’, claims Findlay

Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay said at the weekend his party “got it wrong” in 2019 when it backed the SNP’s even more ambitious, attention-seeking and non-legally binding 2045 target.

He also suggested that, whether they cared to admit it or not, his political opponents knew they had got it wrong too.

Findlay said: “The situation has become clearer ... to everybody in the Scottish Parliament, if they were being honest. Both Labour, the SNP and the rest of them would admit that the 2045 target isn’t just unaffordable, it’s unachievable – that’s the reality.”

Scottish Conservatives leader Russell Findlay welcomes Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch to the stage at the Scottish Conservative party conference at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh last week | PA

The unease is growing on the left and among trade unions too. Labour MP Henry Tufnell broke party ranks last week to demand the jobs of oil and gas workers in his Pembrokeshire constituency are not lost in the push for ever-more wind and solar.

According to a poll earlier this month, commissioned by the Looking For Growth movement, more voters than not now believe net zero-inspired government policies have damaged their living standards.

The Wall Street Journal reports companies in various industries are removing climate change and net zero language from their reports.

The head of the CBI, Rain Newton-Smith, has shifted her organisation’s stance by calling for an end to net zero policies that push up energy prices and get in the way of businesses’ growth ambitions.

‘Gradually, and then suddenly’

In Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, the character Mike is asked how he went bankrupt. “Gradually, and then suddenly,” he replies. The same can be said about shifts in public opinion.

How long might it be before Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, no stranger to U-turns, joins what until recently he might have described as a “bandwagon of the far right” by conceding that perhaps our energy policies are misguided at best?

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Maybe there is no harm in hoovering up as much angst-inducing carbon as we can and pumping it underground. We can see how that goes.

In any case, the £200m from the Treasury is small potatoes set against perhaps trillions of pounds the net zero agenda will ultimately extract from the economy.

But a reading of the room suggests there might be an appetite instead to support moves that would make energy more affordable - and thereby foster prosperity rather than inexorable decline.