Net zero or not? The high-stakes battle over Scotland's CCS future

With Scotland’s 2045 climate change target looming large, Peter Ranscombe asks if technology can help to stop further harmful greenhouse gas emissions.

Sometimes phrases pass into common usage without much thought about what they actually mean – ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘crypto currency’ and ‘quantum computing’ all spring to mind. Yet perhaps the most commonly used phrase with the biggest impact but the least understanding is ‘net zero’.

The ‘net’ part of net zero is crucial, not simply for maintaining a habitable planet but also for Scotland’s economy. Politicians, engineers and environmentalists all recognise that emissions of greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants that warm the atmosphere – will never drop to zero because some oil, gas and coal will still be burned.

That’s where the ‘net’ part comes in. The original target in the UK’s 2008 Climate Change Act was for greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by 80% from 1990’s levels by 2050. In 2019, Theresa May’s government increased that target to 100%, while the Scottish Government introduced its 2045 net-zero target.

As May’s government put it at the time: “‘Net zero’ means any emissions would be balanced by schemes to offset an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, such as planting trees or using technology like carbon capture and storage (CCS).”

Both restoring peatbogs so they absorb rather than emit carbon and planting trees – then cutting them down to store carbon for use as timber before planting more trees – are important steps, but developing CCS technology is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, through storing carbon dioxide in former natural gas fields and other caverns beneath the Earth’s surface.

Crown Estate Scotland (CES), which manages Scotland’s seabed, explains: “To store carbon dioxide under the seabed, a developer requires a property rights agreement – a lease – from CES, as well as a carbon storage permit from the North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA), as the regulator. This is broadly akin to an onshore landowner providing permission for development on land that has to secure planning permission from the relevant authority.

“We are working closely with potential CCS developers, the NSTA, government and other relevant stakeholders to ensure that CCS deployment is planned in a careful and co-ordinated way that provides a secure energy future, and which can help unlock sustainable economic opportunities and skilled jobs for Scotland and the wider UK.”

The UK Government is funding two ‘Track-1 clusters’: HyNet in north-west England and north Wales, and the East Coast Cluster in Teesside, with £21.7 billion committed over 25 years. Questions over two Track-2 clusters – Acorn in Scotland and Viking on Humberside – were raised following 2024’s Westminster election, although Energy Secretary Ed Miliband committed £200 million to Acorn in June 2025. Acorn aims to reuse the gas pipelines that link Grangemouth with St Fergus in Aberdeenshire and depleted gas fields under the North Sea.

Building the financial case

With only two decades to go, how close is Scotland to deploying CCS and will it be available in time to help our nation hit its 2045 net-zero target?

“The timeline for the Track-2 projects is to have them capturing carbon by the end of this decade but, given the Track-1 projects haven’t yet demonstrated whether their technical and financial models are going to work, my suspicion is that the end of this decade is very optimistic,” says Navraj Singh Ghaleigh, senior lecturer in climate law at the University of Edinburgh.

For Laura Petrie, a partner in law firm Brodies’ oil and gas team in Aberdeen, there’s a letter missing from CCS – and that’s ‘U’ for utilisation. Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) is a key consideration for her clients.

“The utilisation is where the economic part of CCS is,” she explains. “There needs to be further development of the other markets for the products that can be created from that stored carbon, including blue hydrogen.”

So-called blue hydrogen is generated by stripping hydrogen atoms from other gases, such as methane, in contrast to ‘green hydrogen’, which is made by using electricity generated from renewable energy sources such as wind and solar to split water into hydrogen and oxygen through a process known as electrolysis. Hydrogen from either process can then be burned as a fuel without generating greenhouse gases.

Navraj says: “The UK is being very ambitious in developing its clusters model and people in places including Australia, Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia are very impressed. But until volumes of carbon dioxide are safely and durably stored in the subsurface, there will naturally be a substantial degree of circumspection around the current plans.”

Laura adds: “The international dimension can’t be overstated. I have clients with projects in Europe – including Austria, France and Germany – who want to capture carbon emissions and then ship them to the UK for storage and utilisation. There is a wider market on the international stage that Scotland needs to be thinking about.”

Accusations of ‘greenwashing’

Environmentalists continue to question the cost and feasibility of CCS. Alex Lee, Friends of the Earth Scotland senior climate campaigner, says: “Carbon capture has already had billions of pounds and decades of work to prove itself and it has failed on its promises everywhere it has been tried.

“Politicians have been making grand promises about this greenwashing tech for over 15 years and have nothing to show for it. Despite the evidence of carbon capture’s failure, ministers are doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results, pandering to the fossil fuel lobby and giving them larger handouts of public money.

“The plans for a new gas-burning power station at Peterhead, Aberdeenshire are built on the rotten foundations of carbon capture. If approved this dangerous project will lock people into paying higher energy bills and create higher climate emissions for decades.”

Alex adds: “Even if by some miracle it worked, the carbon would have to be monitored and guarded forever, creating a hugely expensive, dangerous burden that is forced on to future generations. The safest and most effective way to reduce carbon emissions is to not create them in the first place and that means stopping burning fossil fuels.

“Public money would be far better invested in climate solutions that work today to bring down emissions and will improve lives, such as home insulation, public transport and affordable renewable energy.”