In the UK it’s all about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS). The cost of installing and operating CCS could reach a staggering £408 billion by 2050. In NZ Dollars this is $963,124,800,000. The reason for such a cost is put down to the technology being risky and technologically unproven.
So potentially £408 bn will be required over the next 25 years to install and operate CCS infrastructure within the UK. An average of £5 bn will be needed annually by 2030 to reach the CCS’s Mt CO2 CCS target for that year. (13 mega tonnes of carbon dioxide captured and stored). This increases to an average of £19 billion per year between 2031 and 2050.
Enormous government subsidies will be required to support these projects.
UK subsidies will be paid for by consumers.
Money for CCS operators will be 75% financed by additional electricity bill charges. This is at a time when UK households and businesses are already struggling with high electricity prices.
An open letter sent by a group of climate scientists and organisations to the UK government last year warned that CCS would lock in fossil fuel for decades to come and result in future emissions from methane leaks and from the transportation of LNG of US origin.
The CCS made it clear that CCS is a necessity not an option for the UK: “We have to massively reduce fossil fuel use, but storing carbon will be essential to achieve Net Zero targets. However, this should be funded through a polluter pays system (so Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant!!) rather than through taxes and government subsidies.”
In the UK as in NZ, revenue from the Emissions Trading Scheme is expected to fall from £6 bn in the 2023-04 financial year to £1.8 bn by 2030.
Gas Outlook, whose report author is Andrew Reid, stated that CCS should be pulled back, especially that which is subsidy backed, in preference to other lower carbon energy such as renewable power and storage. Most applications targeted for CCS in the UK are far from technologically proven at scale, meaning there is a high risk that projects will fail to capture the targeted emission volumes.
Net Zero in NZ
It was difficult to find a report on the cost to Net Zero in New Zealand. I managed to find one written by Michael Kelly for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. This is a brief summary of his findings. (Permission has been given to use some of his work).
The cost to 2050 will exceed $550 bn. Written out this looks like: $550,000,000,000. If you take all the health sector workers that will be the size of the workforce needed for 30 years, and it will need about 10% of the global annual production of lithium, cobalt, neodymium, and other materials.
By 2050, the following projects will have been completed:
1. All ground transport will have been electrified
2. Heat, particularly industrial heat, will have been electrified.
3. The electricity sector generation, transmission and distribution will have been greatly expanded to cope with the huge demand for the above two projects.
In addition, the government must have secured public buy-in for what is almost certainly going to involve much social disruption, reduction of freedom of choice, enhanced levels of demand level inflation, reduced capacity for government expenditure on other priorities, diminished living standards, and an economy that is more focused and disciplined than the pubic have been used to.
Taking the latest data, we see that electricity represents about 28% of the energy consumed annually. In 2050, all this energy will need to be provided by green sources.
Transport and Heat
A total of 78% of New Zealand’s process heat is used in industry, particularly by manufacturers. Another 10% is used by the commercial sector. The public sector uses another 7%. To achieve Net Zero virtually all process heat will need to be electrified.
Heat pumps may be deployed to heat homes and other buildings. But the poor insulation levels in NZ mean that major retrofits will need to be undertaken. The cost will be so high that heat pumps are unlikely to be used.
Expanding the Electricity Sector
There are three distinct costs associated with the expansion of electricity. They are new generation, new transmission, and new distribution.
Generation
It is estimated that we will need another 270 petajoules of energy costing $60 Billion. (a petajoule is 1015 joules or 1,000,000,000,000,000 joules. In a dry year, New Zealand’s generation falls by 15%. Our hydro scheme is not sufficient to compensate for all this shortage so some extra energy storage will be required to replace coal burning at Huntly. Additional storage will be needed to keep the lights on when there is insufficient wind and solar. The storage is likely to be very expensive. Nuclear power which is reliable, safe and emissions free will become a viable option once small modular reactors are available. Nuclear’s major benefit is that it avoids the need for expensive storage to back up the intermittency of wind and solar.
Transmission
The cost of transmission depends on what type of energy system is installed in future. Using figures from the US, it is estimated the cost will be $70 bn. The extra substations alone will cost about $300 million
Distribution
In parts of Auckland and Wellington at least, the infrastructure for the local distribution is already at full capacity. Historically, a house has a 60 Amp fuse, the standard being set many decades ago. In the all-electric home of the future a heat pump alone can draw 58 Amps at startup. Fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 33 Amps and electric showers the same. The mains fuses will need upgrading and local substations will need to be greatly expanded too. Houses might need new wiring and streets new transformers. The cost is estimated at about $70 bn. Without this upgrading, city dwellers in particular, will have to live with frequent power failures.
So we have about $200 bn to improve all three above. But this does not include a new vehicle fleet, and the infrastructure for charging them.
Grid Scale Storage
It remains a hard fact that fossil fuels are much more effective at storing energy than any known non-nuclear alternatives.
Let’s consider back-up batteries. The 100 MW, 128MWh battery installed by Elon Musk near Adelaide in 2018 at a cost of $90 million would power the emergency wards of Wellington Regional Hospital for 24 hours on a single 80% to 20% discharge. If a storm took out the transmission lines for a week in Wellington, we would need 7 such batteries. The back-up today is provided by diesel generators with a cost of just $0.5 million.
Some advocate for using Hydrogen as a storage fuel. For a house you would need to store a volume of hydrogen equivalent to a 10m cube. (Imagine if this exploded next to your house!).
To store enough hydrogen for the whole country would need a cube of it with a side of 1.26km! A similar argument applies to using hydrogen for heavy duty vehicles: A truck and trailer doing 20, 000 km per year needs a huge hydrogen store - a cube of sides 60 metres at standard temperature and pressure.
Human Resources
Let’s look at the human resource requirements to deliver the three engineering projects.
Firstly, the workforce required for the electrical works. The UK Engineering firm Atkins, estimate that a $1 bn project in this area lasting 30 years would require more than 50 skilled tradespeople for the duration. For the $200 bn net-zero electricity project, we will therefore need about 3,500 electrical engineers and approximately 11,500 skilled people working full time for the thirty years to 2050. New Zealand currently has 3,500 electrical engineers. Larger numbers would be required in the early years - we would need to train up a lot more. Training takes 7-8 years.
Meanwhile, for retrofitting, both semi-skilled and highly skilled personnel are needed.
There are no prior examples in history to indicate that we can generate such large numbers of skilled personnel and maintain them over 30 years from a standing start.
Bill of Materials
Let’s look at the quantities of the materials required.
We have already covered the costs. The move from fossil fuels to renewables is a move from a fuel-intensive to a materials-intensive energy sector.
As an example, a 600MW combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT), contains 300 tonnes of high-performance steel. We would need 360 x 5 MW wind turbines each running at 33% efficiency and a major storage facility to achieve the same 600 MW continuously from wind turbines. Since the lifetime of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGTs (with a single life extension refit), we would need 720 of them. The concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the concrete in a land-based wind turbine and much less than an offshore one. A 1.8 GW nuclear plant and turbine produce about 1000 W per Kg of steel in the combined unit compared with 2000 W per Kg for a CCGT.
This advantage of CCGTs is offset somewhat by the absence of fuel for renewables. The extraction of oil and gas has only a small impact on the earth’s surface (coming out of the ground in pipes that are less than a metre in diameter), compared with the mining of minerals required for renewables - so that Net Zero could be regarded as environmentally unsustainable.
If NZ was to convert to an electric vehicle fleet overnight, the materials requirements for the batteries alone would be (based on UK data):
1. 21,000 tonnes of cobalt – almost 20% of the globe’s annual production.
2. 26,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate – 7% of the world’s production.
3. At least 720 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium - nearly 10 % of the world’s production of neodymium.
4. 236,000 tonnes of copper - more than 1.5% of the world’s production in 2018.
We can see the need for a very steep rise in the mining of these materials worldwide.
Public Acceptance
It is clear the public has no idea of the scale of the changes that would be required to transition to a Net Zero economy in 30 years’ time. This is not only a matter of costs, the human resources, and materials but also the disturbance to everyday lifestyles that would result. No poll has been conducted to see if the public are willing to meet the level of costs outlined above - well over $250,000 per household. That willingness will surely be particularly doubtful if the public become aware that there will be no measurable difference in the future climate as a result.
To make a difference one would have to help finance similar projects in places such as India, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. If one assumes that the EU, North America, Australasia, and Japan are to underwrite the rest of the world’s activities, then the cost to their citizens will rise by a factor of five. This would take the cost to each NZ household to more than 1 million dollars. In practical terms this takes us into fantasy land.
By all commonly understood value-for-money exercises, climate mitigation simply does not add up. For homes the $250,000 per household would be recouped over more than 50 years at today’s cost of energy, far longer than any sensible investor would tolerate. This cost cannot be transferred to energy consumers. Very few households could afford it. Many middle-income people would be pushed into poverty.
Most alarming climate forecasts are based on the so called RCP8.5 future emissions scenario. This has been widely discredited as being unrealistic. This being so, we can assume that climate change will be a slow process. How many people in NZ have noticed a rapid change in climate-one way or the other? Doesn’t this suggest that adaptation is what is required? Remember those scare tactics of 30 years ago where it was said several countries would be under water within ten years. None of those predictions happened. If sea level in some places is actually rising, it is little more than a millimetre or two per year. No need to panic there.
In the long term, adaption will be a great deal cheaper than trying to stop climate change by cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Has it really been established that carbon dioxide resulting from human activities, causes climate change?
It seems the goal is unattainable on two counts. The first is the enormous cost which would bankrupt the country and make many citizens very poor. Because climate change is a natural process - and it is most unlikely that carbon dioxide is the main driver - no efforts on our part will stop it. We must also take into account some countries with very high emissions seem to be completely disregarding any move to Net Zero, so NZ with minimal emissions would be fighting against these countries also. But there’s another consideration. The world’s population is declining, so human emissions will naturally fall. Pity we won’t be around to check that climate change continues even with falling human emissions.
We can sell adaptation to the population, but can we sell mitigation? In the past, groups of humans have adapted to extremes of hot and cold. We can do it again.
References
Bedeschi, Beatrice: CCS Costs in UK could reach £408 bn by 2025. Gas Outlook.
- Sat Oct 3 2016
Reid, Andrew: The runaway cost of UK carbon capture and storage subsidies, IEEFA. - Sept 2026
Author unknown: Carbon Capture will push up energy bills- but could save you money in the long run. “The Paper” Oct 4 2024
Kelly, Michael. Net Zero for New Zealand, The Global Warming Policy Foundation
Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.
Enormous government subsidies will be required to support these projects.
UK subsidies will be paid for by consumers.
Money for CCS operators will be 75% financed by additional electricity bill charges. This is at a time when UK households and businesses are already struggling with high electricity prices.
An open letter sent by a group of climate scientists and organisations to the UK government last year warned that CCS would lock in fossil fuel for decades to come and result in future emissions from methane leaks and from the transportation of LNG of US origin.
The CCS made it clear that CCS is a necessity not an option for the UK: “We have to massively reduce fossil fuel use, but storing carbon will be essential to achieve Net Zero targets. However, this should be funded through a polluter pays system (so Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant!!) rather than through taxes and government subsidies.”
In the UK as in NZ, revenue from the Emissions Trading Scheme is expected to fall from £6 bn in the 2023-04 financial year to £1.8 bn by 2030.
Gas Outlook, whose report author is Andrew Reid, stated that CCS should be pulled back, especially that which is subsidy backed, in preference to other lower carbon energy such as renewable power and storage. Most applications targeted for CCS in the UK are far from technologically proven at scale, meaning there is a high risk that projects will fail to capture the targeted emission volumes.
Net Zero in NZ
It was difficult to find a report on the cost to Net Zero in New Zealand. I managed to find one written by Michael Kelly for the Global Warming Policy Foundation. This is a brief summary of his findings. (Permission has been given to use some of his work).
The cost to 2050 will exceed $550 bn. Written out this looks like: $550,000,000,000. If you take all the health sector workers that will be the size of the workforce needed for 30 years, and it will need about 10% of the global annual production of lithium, cobalt, neodymium, and other materials.
By 2050, the following projects will have been completed:
1. All ground transport will have been electrified
2. Heat, particularly industrial heat, will have been electrified.
3. The electricity sector generation, transmission and distribution will have been greatly expanded to cope with the huge demand for the above two projects.
In addition, the government must have secured public buy-in for what is almost certainly going to involve much social disruption, reduction of freedom of choice, enhanced levels of demand level inflation, reduced capacity for government expenditure on other priorities, diminished living standards, and an economy that is more focused and disciplined than the pubic have been used to.
Taking the latest data, we see that electricity represents about 28% of the energy consumed annually. In 2050, all this energy will need to be provided by green sources.
Transport and Heat
A total of 78% of New Zealand’s process heat is used in industry, particularly by manufacturers. Another 10% is used by the commercial sector. The public sector uses another 7%. To achieve Net Zero virtually all process heat will need to be electrified.
Heat pumps may be deployed to heat homes and other buildings. But the poor insulation levels in NZ mean that major retrofits will need to be undertaken. The cost will be so high that heat pumps are unlikely to be used.
Expanding the Electricity Sector
There are three distinct costs associated with the expansion of electricity. They are new generation, new transmission, and new distribution.
Generation
It is estimated that we will need another 270 petajoules of energy costing $60 Billion. (a petajoule is 1015 joules or 1,000,000,000,000,000 joules. In a dry year, New Zealand’s generation falls by 15%. Our hydro scheme is not sufficient to compensate for all this shortage so some extra energy storage will be required to replace coal burning at Huntly. Additional storage will be needed to keep the lights on when there is insufficient wind and solar. The storage is likely to be very expensive. Nuclear power which is reliable, safe and emissions free will become a viable option once small modular reactors are available. Nuclear’s major benefit is that it avoids the need for expensive storage to back up the intermittency of wind and solar.
Transmission
The cost of transmission depends on what type of energy system is installed in future. Using figures from the US, it is estimated the cost will be $70 bn. The extra substations alone will cost about $300 million
Distribution
In parts of Auckland and Wellington at least, the infrastructure for the local distribution is already at full capacity. Historically, a house has a 60 Amp fuse, the standard being set many decades ago. In the all-electric home of the future a heat pump alone can draw 58 Amps at startup. Fast chargers for electric vehicles draw 33 Amps and electric showers the same. The mains fuses will need upgrading and local substations will need to be greatly expanded too. Houses might need new wiring and streets new transformers. The cost is estimated at about $70 bn. Without this upgrading, city dwellers in particular, will have to live with frequent power failures.
So we have about $200 bn to improve all three above. But this does not include a new vehicle fleet, and the infrastructure for charging them.
Grid Scale Storage
It remains a hard fact that fossil fuels are much more effective at storing energy than any known non-nuclear alternatives.
Let’s consider back-up batteries. The 100 MW, 128MWh battery installed by Elon Musk near Adelaide in 2018 at a cost of $90 million would power the emergency wards of Wellington Regional Hospital for 24 hours on a single 80% to 20% discharge. If a storm took out the transmission lines for a week in Wellington, we would need 7 such batteries. The back-up today is provided by diesel generators with a cost of just $0.5 million.
Some advocate for using Hydrogen as a storage fuel. For a house you would need to store a volume of hydrogen equivalent to a 10m cube. (Imagine if this exploded next to your house!).
To store enough hydrogen for the whole country would need a cube of it with a side of 1.26km! A similar argument applies to using hydrogen for heavy duty vehicles: A truck and trailer doing 20, 000 km per year needs a huge hydrogen store - a cube of sides 60 metres at standard temperature and pressure.
Human Resources
Let’s look at the human resource requirements to deliver the three engineering projects.
Firstly, the workforce required for the electrical works. The UK Engineering firm Atkins, estimate that a $1 bn project in this area lasting 30 years would require more than 50 skilled tradespeople for the duration. For the $200 bn net-zero electricity project, we will therefore need about 3,500 electrical engineers and approximately 11,500 skilled people working full time for the thirty years to 2050. New Zealand currently has 3,500 electrical engineers. Larger numbers would be required in the early years - we would need to train up a lot more. Training takes 7-8 years.
Meanwhile, for retrofitting, both semi-skilled and highly skilled personnel are needed.
There are no prior examples in history to indicate that we can generate such large numbers of skilled personnel and maintain them over 30 years from a standing start.
Bill of Materials
Let’s look at the quantities of the materials required.
We have already covered the costs. The move from fossil fuels to renewables is a move from a fuel-intensive to a materials-intensive energy sector.
As an example, a 600MW combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT), contains 300 tonnes of high-performance steel. We would need 360 x 5 MW wind turbines each running at 33% efficiency and a major storage facility to achieve the same 600 MW continuously from wind turbines. Since the lifetime of wind turbines at 25 years is less than half that of CCGTs (with a single life extension refit), we would need 720 of them. The concrete in the plinth of a single CCGT is comparable to the concrete in a land-based wind turbine and much less than an offshore one. A 1.8 GW nuclear plant and turbine produce about 1000 W per Kg of steel in the combined unit compared with 2000 W per Kg for a CCGT.
This advantage of CCGTs is offset somewhat by the absence of fuel for renewables. The extraction of oil and gas has only a small impact on the earth’s surface (coming out of the ground in pipes that are less than a metre in diameter), compared with the mining of minerals required for renewables - so that Net Zero could be regarded as environmentally unsustainable.
If NZ was to convert to an electric vehicle fleet overnight, the materials requirements for the batteries alone would be (based on UK data):
1. 21,000 tonnes of cobalt – almost 20% of the globe’s annual production.
2. 26,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate – 7% of the world’s production.
3. At least 720 tonnes of neodymium and dysprosium - nearly 10 % of the world’s production of neodymium.
4. 236,000 tonnes of copper - more than 1.5% of the world’s production in 2018.
We can see the need for a very steep rise in the mining of these materials worldwide.
Public Acceptance
It is clear the public has no idea of the scale of the changes that would be required to transition to a Net Zero economy in 30 years’ time. This is not only a matter of costs, the human resources, and materials but also the disturbance to everyday lifestyles that would result. No poll has been conducted to see if the public are willing to meet the level of costs outlined above - well over $250,000 per household. That willingness will surely be particularly doubtful if the public become aware that there will be no measurable difference in the future climate as a result.
To make a difference one would have to help finance similar projects in places such as India, South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. If one assumes that the EU, North America, Australasia, and Japan are to underwrite the rest of the world’s activities, then the cost to their citizens will rise by a factor of five. This would take the cost to each NZ household to more than 1 million dollars. In practical terms this takes us into fantasy land.
By all commonly understood value-for-money exercises, climate mitigation simply does not add up. For homes the $250,000 per household would be recouped over more than 50 years at today’s cost of energy, far longer than any sensible investor would tolerate. This cost cannot be transferred to energy consumers. Very few households could afford it. Many middle-income people would be pushed into poverty.
Most alarming climate forecasts are based on the so called RCP8.5 future emissions scenario. This has been widely discredited as being unrealistic. This being so, we can assume that climate change will be a slow process. How many people in NZ have noticed a rapid change in climate-one way or the other? Doesn’t this suggest that adaptation is what is required? Remember those scare tactics of 30 years ago where it was said several countries would be under water within ten years. None of those predictions happened. If sea level in some places is actually rising, it is little more than a millimetre or two per year. No need to panic there.
In the long term, adaption will be a great deal cheaper than trying to stop climate change by cutting carbon dioxide emissions. Has it really been established that carbon dioxide resulting from human activities, causes climate change?
It seems the goal is unattainable on two counts. The first is the enormous cost which would bankrupt the country and make many citizens very poor. Because climate change is a natural process - and it is most unlikely that carbon dioxide is the main driver - no efforts on our part will stop it. We must also take into account some countries with very high emissions seem to be completely disregarding any move to Net Zero, so NZ with minimal emissions would be fighting against these countries also. But there’s another consideration. The world’s population is declining, so human emissions will naturally fall. Pity we won’t be around to check that climate change continues even with falling human emissions.
We can sell adaptation to the population, but can we sell mitigation? In the past, groups of humans have adapted to extremes of hot and cold. We can do it again.
References
Bedeschi, Beatrice: CCS Costs in UK could reach £408 bn by 2025. Gas Outlook.
- Sat Oct 3 2016
Reid, Andrew: The runaway cost of UK carbon capture and storage subsidies, IEEFA. - Sept 2026
Author unknown: Carbon Capture will push up energy bills- but could save you money in the long run. “The Paper” Oct 4 2024
Kelly, Michael. Net Zero for New Zealand, The Global Warming Policy Foundation
Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.
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