Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is often touted as a crucial tool for fighting climate change. Politicians and fossil fuel executives paint it as a silver bullet. But dig a little deeper, and you'll find a groundswell of opposition from scientists, environmentalists, and local communities. Why are people against CCS? It's not a simple case of being anti-technology. The resistance is rooted in six concrete, often overlooked concerns about cost, safety, ethics, and whether it's a dangerous distraction from real solutions.

I've followed this debate for years. The more I learn, the more I see the gap between the polished PR and the messy reality on the ground.

The High Cost and Questionable Efficiency of CCS

Let's start with the wallet. CCS is extraordinarily expensive. The International Energy Agency (IEA) notes that adding carbon capture to a power plant increases the capital cost significantly and requires substantial energy to run the capture process itself.

This "parasitic load" is a killer. Imagine your car needed to use a quarter of its own fuel just to run a device that catches its own exhaust. You'd question the basic design.

Proponents argue costs will fall with scale. But after decades and billions in subsidies, costs haven't plummeted like they have for solar panels. The International Energy Agency itself states that most existing projects are in natural gas processing, where capture is cheaper because the CO2 stream is already concentrated. Applying it to the diluted exhaust of a power plant is a much harder, costlier engineering challenge.

The Efficiency Mirage

Even when it works, it's rarely 100% efficient. Most commercial systems capture about 90% of the CO2. That sounds good until you realize a 10% leak rate on a million-tonne source is still 100,000 tonnes of CO2 going straight into the atmosphere every year. For a climate solution, that's a major flaw.

Frankly, the economics look shaky when you compare it to building new wind or solar, whose levelized cost of energy is now consistently lower without needing a complex, add-on capture system.

The Safety and Leakage Conundrum: A Time Bomb?

This is the fear that keeps communities up at night. We're talking about injecting billions of tonnes of a dangerous, asphyxiating gas underground, hoping it stays there for millennia. The scale of the promise is matched by the scale of the risk.

Proponents say modern sites are carefully monitored. But monitoring for 100 years is one thing. Who guarantees monitoring and liability for 1,000 or 10,000 years? Corporations don't last that long. Governments change. We're asking future societies to babysit our waste.

Then there's the potential for slower, chronic leaks that could acidify groundwater or soil. A report from the National Academies of Sciences has highlighted the need for robust long-term monitoring frameworks that simply don't exist yet at the required scale.

You don't need a vivid imagination to see the problem. You just need to look at the history of other industrial waste and how often "permanent" storage solutions fail.

A Lifeline for Fossil Fuels, Not a Transition

Here's the most contentious point. Critics see CCS not as a bridge to a clean future, but as a life-support machine for the fossil fuel industry.

The argument goes like this: By promoting the idea that we can "clean up" fossil fuels, CCS provides a social and political license to continue drilling, mining, and burning. It kicks the can down the road on the hard task of actually phasing out fossil fuels.

Look at how it's marketed. The language is often about "clean coal" or "low-carbon gas." It subtly reinforces the idea that these energy sources have a long-term future. This directly conflicts with the core finding of climate science: to avoid the worst impacts, we need to leave most fossil fuel reserves in the ground.

I remember at an industry conference, a senior executive literally said, "CCS allows us to imagine a future where we still use oil and gas for another century." That's not a transition. That's a postponement.

The "Moral Hazard" and Greenwashing Risk

This is a sophisticated but crucial ethical argument. "Moral hazard" means that by having a perceived safety net (CCS), we are encouraged to take greater risks (continue high emissions).

• For Policymakers: It can be used as an excuse to avoid passing tougher regulations on emissions or investing adequately in renewables. "We don't need to mandate a phase-out; technology will fix it."
• For Companies: It's a powerful public relations tool. A company can announce a CCS pilot project, garner positive headlines, and distract from its core business of expanding fossil fuel production. This is textbook greenwashing.

When a major oil company spends 1% of its capital budget on CCS and 99% on finding more oil and gas, you have to question its commitment to the technology as a climate solution.

Community Opposition and Environmental Justice

This isn't an abstract debate. It's happening in real towns and landscapes. And on the ground, the opposition is fierce and personal.

Pipelines need to be built from capture sites to storage sites. These pipelines carry compressed CO2, which can be hazardous if ruptured. Storage sites are often targeted for rural or disadvantaged communities. This raises major environmental justice issues.

Why should these communities, which often have suffered from industrial pollution for decades, now bear the long-term risk of storing the world's carbon waste? The pattern is familiar: the benefits (jobs, tax revenue) are often temporary and overstated, while the risks and disruptions are permanent.

Look at the fight over the Midwest Carbon Express pipeline in the US or resistance to storage sites in the North Sea region. It's not just NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard). It's a profound distrust of corporations and governments that have broken promises before. It's about property rights, fear of contamination, and a lack of meaningful consent.

They ask a simple, fair question: "If this is so safe, why isn't it being done under Manhattan or London?"

Diversion of Resources and Attention

Finally, there's the opportunity cost argument. Money and political capital are finite. Every billion dollars poured into subsidizing CCS is a billion dollars not spent on:

• Deploying proven, cheap, and scalable renewables (wind, solar).
• Modernizing the electricity grid for a renewable future.
• Investing in energy efficiency, which is the cheapest "fuel" of all.
• Developing energy storage solutions.

Opponents see CCS as a shiny, complex toy that attracts funding and attention away from the boring, essential work of deploying the solutions we already have. Climate change is an urgent problem. We don't have decades to wait for CCS to maybe become affordable and reliable at scale. We need to deploy the fastest, cheapest, most effective tools now.

Think of it like a house on fire. CCS is like designing a fancy, futuristic fire-retardant wallpaper for the future. Meanwhile, your opponents are yelling to just grab the hose and the fire extinguisher that are sitting right there (renewables, efficiency, electrification). Which approach makes more sense in an emergency?

The debate around CCS isn't about being for or against technology. It's a debate about priority, justice, and realism. Is it a necessary tool for hard-to-abate industries like cement or steel? Perhaps. But is it a blanket justification to prolong the age of fossil-fueled power generation? The opposition, grounded in economics, safety, and ethics, gives a resounding "no."

Understanding these reasons is key to having an honest conversation about our climate future. It forces us to ask: are we investing in a true transition, or are we building a very expensive bridge to nowhere?