Dead and unburied: The resurrection of carbon capture and storage in the UK 2015-2018

The UK’s industrial decarbonisation strategy has relied heavily on getting viable carbon capture and storage (CCS) infrastructure and business models in place. What is striking is that such policy development has happened within a relatively short period of time, following on from an almost complete collapse of CCS policy at the end of 2015.

This report explores this resurrection of CCS as a key element in the context for the development of UK industrial decarbonisation strategy. It uses the multiple streams approach (MSA) pioneered by Kingdon (1995) as an organising framework. The report argues that the resurrection of CCS policy in the second half of the 2010s was due to a coupling of the net zero agenda, a changing political agenda post-Brexit that made regional equity much more important, and a new approach to CCS support that was incubated by a resilient and broad-based technology advocacy coalition.