Last week, the Prime Minister confirmed funding for two carbon capture projects in Merseyside and Teesside, and he and the Chancellor made a headline commitment to £21.7 billion of support for carbon capture and storage (CCS) over the next 25 years. This long-term commitment represents continuity from the position of the previous Conservative government, which, in 2023, pledged £20 billion over 20 years.

The announcement of project funding today is actually the culmination of a long process going back to the 2021 Industrial Decarbonisation Strategy, and before that to the revival of Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage (CCUS) in the wake of a disastrous cancellation of a demonstration project in 2015. 

This blog post is not about CCUS itself. Rather, it is about how much information about how policy decisions are made, including those about CCUS, is put in the public domain. In the period since 2015, energy policy making has become worryingly less transparent.

How was CCUS policy rescued?

The 2015 demo project cancellation is estimated to have costed taxpayers up to £100 million. So how exactly was CCUS rescued and rethought immediately after that? 

This was the focus of a research project we undertook in 2022-23, (a write up can be found here). A particular focus for the research was the development of so-called ‘business models’ for carbon capture. In this case, that meant revenue support payments to factories, power stations and incinerators that will cover the costs of carbon capture over 15 years.

In this kind of research, a key question is how external actors, especially corporate actors, interact with government as policy is developed. There are a range of potential sources for such research, including responses to government consultations, and sometimes records of special groups set up to help develop the detail of policy design. However, in this case, we found it was very hard to get access to this kind of information.The consultation document on carbon capture business modules is publicly available. In the past, responses to such consultations were also available – more on that below. But the responses to the CCUS business models consultation are not. Instead, there is a summary statement:

We received 72 responses to the consultation on CCUS business models. Around a quarter of responses were from large business, and a further quarter from small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), with the remainder being from special interest groups, trade associations, academics, private individuals and other interested parties.

Opaque ‘expert groups’

The government also set up various groups to feed in to the design of CCUS support mechanisms, which large energy and industrial companies participated in. But again, it was unusually difficult to find out who was in these groups, or what they discussed. 

A CCUS Cost Challenge Taskforce was set up by the Energy Minister in 2018. The terms of reference, report and a summary of two plenary meetings is available here, but there are no details of minutes or sub-group meetings. In 2019 a CCUS Advisory Group was set up consisting of “industry, finance and policy experts to help deliver the Government’s CCUS Action Plan”. This Group is mentioned in the CCUS Business Model consultation document, but no further information was provided by the government. 

The government then set up a series of ‘expert groups’ to feed into the detailed design of CCUS support business models for different applications (e.g. dispatchable power CCUS, industrial CCUS etc.). These were mentioned in passing in the government’s 2020 response to the CCUS business models consultation, but no further information was made available. 

We asked officials at the relevant government department (BEIS at the time, now DESNZ) whether as academic researchers we could see minutes and meeting papers for the CCUS expert groups. This was in March 2022. By April it became clear that these could be released only by submitting a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which we then did in July 2022. Under the Act the relevant government department is supposed to respond to the request within 20 days, but by November we had heard nothing and chased and were assured that the information would be forthcoming quickly, but by December we had to follow up again, and then again in March, at which point we said we would go to the Information Commissioner. 

Finally in April 2023 we were sent information on the membership of the Industrial CCUS expert group, and minutes of meetings from May 2020 to June 2022. However, the latter were redacted, with not only names of individuals but also organisational identifiers blacked out. 

A new level of secrecy

As hinted at above, this was a new level of secrecy in the energy policy formation process. 

Our experience in studying the CCUS business model development really contrasted with an earlier research project I led in 2016-17, which was a study of the influence of large electricity generating companies on the design of the capacity market (CM) for electricity (write-ups of the research can be found here, here and here). In this case, there were two consultations by government on the design of the CM, in 2010 and 2011. All of the responses by companies and other actors were all publicly available on the internet at the time, and still are, here and here. 

Similarly to the CCUS case, the government also set up an ‘expert group’ and a ‘Collaborative Development’ process in 2013 to feed into detailed decisions about the design of the CM. The membership of the expert group included many of the large generating companies, along with other commercial actors, NGOs and academics. The meeting papers for the expert group were available, and still are, here. Meeting papers for and other information on the Collaborative Development process were available, and still are, here.

A clear move away from transparency

There has thus been a change between the mid-2010s and the early 2020s in the amount of information made publicly available about consultations on policy and aspects of energy policy development, such as expert groups. 

Whereas information on the Capacity Market policy formulation in the early 2010s was readily available, similar information on CCUS policy development in the late 2010s was difficult or impossible to obtain. It is not clear why this was the case. GDPR data protection regulations were brought in in 2016, but these are generally understood to be about protecting the abuse of personal data, rather than obfuscating the position of corporations or organisations on policy questions.

Does any of this matter, or is it just academics whining about policy process research becoming more difficult? I would argue that it does matter.

Why it matters

As the announcement by the Prime Minister indicates, policies like the Capacity Markets and the CCUS business models involve significant amounts of consumer and taxpayer money. Just over £4 billion in CM contracts was allocated to electricity generation companies between 2014 and 2020, and this money came from electricity consumers. Most of the allocation went to the large generating companies that were dominant in expert groups and responded to consultations. 

The amount that will be spent on the CCUS business models, which will be funded from tax, is not yet known but, as noted, the government has now pledged almost £22 billion over 25 years. 

There is a basic accountability argument about providing information about how these policies are developed, so that the public can be confident that they have not been unduly influenced by organised interests. 

Transparency is the best policy

It is not unreasonable for governments to engage closely with large energy companies in developing policy, since in a privatised system these companies have expertise that government does not have. And, ultimately, industry has to work under the direction of these policies. 

However, precisely because such close engagement provides companies and business associations with institutional venues for lobbying and influencing policy development to their benefit, it is essential for the public interest and public confidence in the policy process that there be rigorous transparency about this engagement.

There is a counter-argument about making such information public, which is that attempts at influence will be driven into informal channels (which is actually what happened in the case of the Capacity Markets). However, in reality, such attempts typically do not remain secret (which is also what happened in the case of the CM). Truth will out, and trying to hide it risks damaging both government credibility and policy development. In the relationships between powerful corporate actors and government, transparency really is the best policy.

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