Capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) to use or store remains one of the costliest ways to cut emissions. That means the technique – known as CCUS – has yet to scale up, still relies on taxpayer support and should only be pursued after other green solutions, key industry players told a recent conference in London.
Companies and governments that depend heavily on fossil fuel revenues have long promoted CCUS technology as a way to carry on producing and consuming fossil fuels while keeping emissions down.
But over 50 years since the first project began operating, CCUS is still barely used. According to the Global CCS Institute, just 50 facilities were running around the world in 2024, with the capacity to capture about a thousandth of global emissions.
Most of those capture CO2 from gas facilities and pump it underground to squeeze more oil from reservoirs, a process called enhanced oil recovery (EOR).
At this month’s Carbon Capture Global Summit 2025 – organised by Leader Associates – business representatives admitted that the technology has failed to expand on a commercial scale despite strong government support. CCUS momentum has even “plateaued a wee bit” in 2025, said Mhairidh Evans, head of CCUS research at consultancy Wood Mackenzie.
Subsidies still needed
Julia Dubinina, a former Shell manager now developing oil and gas firm Harbour Energy’s carbon storage business, was asked if CCUS is entering its “deployment phase”. She replied that it is “too early to talk about scale”, adding “we need to be careful of not trying to fly before we can walk”. “There is still quite a lot of work to be done,” she added.
She remains cautious partly because “public funding is an absolute must for every project, and scaling is kind of limited when you need public funding for every single project,” she explained.
The industry depends on subsidies because capturing and transporting CO2 is among the most expensive climate solutions. In 2021, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists reported that while solar and wind investments usually save money, CCUS costs $50-200 per tonne of CO2 captured.
In a keynote speech at the conference, Katharina Beumelberg, sustainability chief at Heidelberg Materials – which produces cement, aggregates, concrete and asphalt – acknowledged the sector’s reliance on taxpayer support.
Praising the Norwegian government’s funding for one of the company’s CCUS projects, she said: “We need these funding processes to be able to do this pioneering work because, otherwise, from the private sector it would be unrealistic to get there”. She added: “Whatever we do in the end needs to make money.”
Beumelberg called for more taxpayer support for CCUS. Noting that three-fifths of Heidelberg’s products are used in government-funded projects, she said governments should create a market for carbon-free products, “recognising that a carbon-free product in the end does need to come with different pricing because it is carbon-free”.
Because of its high cost, most experts say CCUS should be reserved for sectors that are hard to clean up in other ways like steel, chemicals and particularly cement.
Expensive last resort
Cement-making produces 8% of global emissions, more than any country apart from the US and China, as fossil fuels are burned to heat limestone and the chemical process itself releases CO2.
But Rozemarijn Wesby, vice-president of CCUS at the world’s biggest cement company Holcim, told the conference that even in cement, the high cost of CCUS means it is only the “last piece of the puzzle”.
That’s because Holcim’s decarbonisation goal is more important than its CCUS goal, she said – and CCUS is one of the more expensive ways to cut emissions. For that reason, Holcim is first ensuring that its power is “green”, fuels are “sustainable and renewable” and emissions avoided “wherever possible”.
Evans of Wood Mackenzie echoed this, saying governments and companies should prioritise energy efficiency, then “electrifying everything that we possibly can with renewables, then fuel switching [and] substituting” before “at the last, directly abating or removing carbon dioxide”.
Wesby stressed that using CCUS only as a last step limits costs and prevents oversized “downstream” infrastructure. The CCUS infrastructure discussed at the conference included pipelines and trains to move CO2, terminals to store, compress and load it onto ships, and underground storage sites.
A Nature study published this month, however, found that the world’s CO2 storage potential is far more constrained than previously thought. Lead author Matthew Gidden of the University of Maryland argued in a post on CarbonBrief that governments should prioritise who gets access to storage space.
Carbon capture for gas plants?
Electricity is one of the easiest sectors to decarbonise because renewable power is often cheaper than fossil fuels. As of 2024, only five fossil-fuel power plants had CCUS, all of which used the CO2 for EOR. Only one, Huaneng Yangpu in China, is a gas power station and that is just a demonstration project.
Nonetheless, the UK government financially supports a CCUS project at a gas plant in England’s Northeast and is considering support for another in Wales run by power firm Uniper. Mike Lockett, Uniper’s UK head, said that Germany’s new centre right-led government had also “opened the door for gas-fired CCS”.
Supporters say such plants produce flexible and dispatchable power, unlike solar and wind. Critics argue batteries, demand management, nuclear and cross-border interconnections can provide sufficient backup.
Greg Jackson, the chief executive of Octopus, a UK-based clean energy, electric vehicle services and heat pump company, said recently that – while it’s useful for cement – subsidising CCUS for energy is misguided.
Jackson, who is also an official adviser to the UK government, told the Financial Times Weekend Festival that the technology has “been a gift to the oil and gas industry to carry on what they’re doing and carry on the fiction that somehow enormous amounts of public money should enable them to keep doing it”.
“It’s a boondoggle for oil and gas – and we would be better off in the UK just burning unabated gas, because the cheaper we make electricity, the cheaper our heat pumps and electric cars are going to be and they are the key to emissions reductions,” he said.
Risk of pipeline leaks
Building out CCUS on a large scale will involve vast CO2 pipeline networks. These come with risks: In 2020, a landslide caused a carbon pipeline to leak in the US state of Mississippi, hospitalising at least 45 people. High concentrations of CO2 can cause headaches, drowsiness, elevated heartbeat and blood pressure, and even death.
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Climate Home News asked Niko Bosnjak, policy and communications lead at carbon pipeline operator Open Grid Europe (OGE), which is converting German gas pipelines to carry CO2, if similar leaks could happen in Europe.
He said he had heard about the Mississippi incident, although he didn’t “know exactly what happened”. OGE, he added, is working on a security framework and “looking at the thickness of the pipeline in a way that is supposed to provide more security”.
Despite such concerns, CCUS has continued to receive strong political backing. US President Donald Trump, for example, cut subsidies for other green technologies but expanded support for CCUS, while India is preparing CCUS subsidies.
“The need for CCS is broadly recognised at the political level,” said Shell’s CCS general manager Kelly Ripley. Oil and gas giant Shell is launching CCUS projects – especially in North America and northwest Europe – she added, and is “doing a lot of learning from this political and regulatory perspective and also hoping to bring other countries on the same journey with us”.
The post Industry says carbon capture still an expensive last resort to cut emissions appeared first on Climate Home News.
Industry says carbon capture still an expensive last resort to cut emissions
An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.