Hello, welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We're the charity and think tank dedicated to achieving

ambitious leadership for the environment. I'm Liam Hardy, one of the heads of research at Green

Alliance, and today I'm going to be talking to our other head of research, Heather Plumpton,

about carbon capture and storage, or CCS for short. She has recently published a briefing called

Is the Government Wasting Money on

CCS. So as you can tell, this is a pretty controversial topic among climate campaigners and experts,

with some arguing that we definitely need it to meet our climate targets and others saying

it's nothing but fossil fuel industry greenwashing. The government

has made it a core part of their offering to industrial heartlands and the central plank of their

net zero plans. So what's going on? Today we're going to answer questions like, what actually

is this technology and how does it work? Do we need it? Who's going to pay for it? What's the role

of the oil and gas industry and what is government getting right or wrong and what needs to change?

Let's kick off by introducing ourselves and our interests in CCS. I've been working on how

to decarbonise heavy industry for the past three years, particularly

looking at the chemical industry in the UK, and more broadly the potential for many industrial

processes to be directly electrified, removing the need for fossil fuels in the first place.

This is where CCS comes in.

So while some processes are ready to be electrified, some or not, and we might need

other solutions in the mix as well, like clean hydrogen and in some cases CCS, if we want to

reduce those emissions from these industrial processes. Heather, thanks for joining me. Would

you like to introduce yourself? Thanks, Liam. So yeah, I come from a slightly different perspective in that I led our work

for a few years on phasing out fossil fuels from the UK. So looking at things like oil and gas licensing,

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