The government has pledged nearly £22bn to fund projects that capture greenhouse gases from polluting plants and store them underground, as it races to reach strict climate targets.
The plans are designed to generate private investment and jobs in Merseyside and Teesside, two industry-heavy areas that will be home to the new “carbon capture clusters”.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said the move was “reigniting our industrial heartlands by investing in the industry of the future”, though there are questions about how best to use this expensive technology.
Carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) has been developed to combat climate change.
It captures the planet-warming carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels or from heavy industry, and puts it to use or stores it underground.
Image: How CCUS can work, by capturing the carbon dioxide emissions from something like a gas plant or cement factory, transporting them through existing gas pipes, and storing them in a depleted oil or gas field under the sea
It is expensive and difficult, but the UK’s climate advisers, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), and United Nations scientists say it is essential to get the world to net zero, which the UK is targeting for 2050.
Net zero means cutting emissions as much as possible and offsetting or capturing the stubborn remaining ones.
More on Climate Change
Related Topics:
Today the government has committed up to £21.7bn over 25 years, to be given in subsidies to sites in the Teesside and Merseyside “clusters” – from 2028.
It will be split between three projects, which are capturing carbon dioxide released either from making hydrogen, generating gas power or burning waste to create energy from 2028.
The gas – up to 8.5 million tonnes of carbon emissions – will be locked away in empty gas fields in the Liverpool Bay and the North Sea.
The government hopes it will attract £8bn in private investment, create 4,000 direct jobs and support a further 50,000.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
1:41
Can carbon capture help fight climate change?
The cash will pay for fewer projects than hoped – the last government suggested a £20bn pot of money for similar projects – but the new administration says those plans weren’t properly costed, and the funding hadn’t been allocated.
The funding is to come from a mixture of Treasury money and energy bills, but the government has been coy about the split so far.
Questions on this might cause a headache for Labour, which has been complaining about an inherited £22bn budget black hole.
Sir Keir said the announcement will “give industry the certainty it needs” and “help deliver jobs, kickstart growth, and repair this country once and for all”.
Will it help jobs and business?
It hopes to fund the first large scale hydrogen production plant in the UK, and help the oil and gas sector and its transferable skills move over to green industries.
Does carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) work?
CCUS has made slow progress: promised for decades but barely scaled, with just 45 commercial sites globally.
However, it began to pick up in the last few years, with 700 plants now in some stage of development around the world.
The world’s first CCUS plant has stored CO2 under Norway’s waters since 1996, though elsewhere a few concerns linger about whether some projects leak gas.
James Richardson, acting chief executive of the CCC, said: “We can’t hit the country’s targets without CCUS, so this commitment to it is very reassuring”.
How should CCUS be used?
Some believe expensive CCUS should be preserved for areas like cement or lime-production, that are very hard to clean up in any other way, rather than for sectors for which there are greener alternatives.
Greenpeace UK’s Doug Parr warned of a “risk of locking ourselves into second-rate solutions”.
The government hopes this funding for the three sites that are ready to go will lay the foundations for further CCUS projects.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said he has never been more bullish about the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act being passed after his time in Washington, DC this week.
London’s mayor Sir Sadiq Khan has for the first time described the situation in Gaza as a “genocide”, becoming the most senior Labour figure to contradict the government’s official position.
It is claimed the government wants to avoid the issue dominating a news conference the two men plan to hold, according to The Times.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
3:47
Trump meets Starmer: What can we expect?
The prime minister has found himself at odds with the US administration over the move, which is opposed to official recognition of Palestine.
The mayor of London, who has engaged in a long-running spat with Mr Trump, has added to the political tension by contradicting official Labour policy at a people’s question time event on Wednesday.
“I think it’s inescapable to draw the conclusion in Gaza we are seeing before our very eyes a genocide,” said Sir Sadiq.
Sir Keir has previously pledged to recognise Palestinian statehood ahead of next week’s United Nations General Assembly in New York if Israel does not meet a series of conditions to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.
Other nations, including France, Australia and Canada, have said they plan to take the same step at the UN gathering.
The UK has consistently argued that the issue of whether Israel has committed genocide was a matter for the courts. Israel is fighting a case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague in which the country is accused of genocide.
But some opposition leaders, including Zack Polanski for the Green Party, and the Liberal Democrats’ Sir Ed Davey have specifically referred to the situation in Gaza as genocide.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
3:05
Is Israel committing genocide?
On Tuesday, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released a report, claiming: “It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza”.
It said Israel’s actions meet the criteria set down for defining a genocide.
In years to come, it may become known simply as Chequers ’25.
But today’s summit between Sir Keir Starmer and Donald Trump, at the prime minister’s country retreat, has the potential to be a landmark moment in UK-US history.
There’s plenty of scope for it to go horribly wrong, of course: over Jeffrey Epstein, Sir Keir’s pledge to recognise Palestine, the president’s lukewarm support for Ukraine, the Chagos Islands sell-off, or free speech.
But on the other hand, it could be a triumph for the so-called “special relationship” – as well as relations between these two unlikely allies – with deals on trade and tariffs and an improbably blossoming bromance.
Either way, this Chequers summit – on the president’s historic second state visit to the UK – could turn out to be one of the most notable one-to-one meetings between PM and president in 20th and 21st century history.
Image: Donald Trump and Keir Starmer wave as they board Air Force One on a previous trip. Pic: AP
It was then that the PM theatrically pulled King Charles’s invitation for this week’s visit out of his inside pocket in a spectacular stunt surely masterminded by the “Prince of Darkness”, spin doctor-turned-ambassador (until last week, anyway) Peter Mandelson.
And over the years, there have been some remarkable and historic meetings and relationships, good and bad, between UK prime ministers and American presidents.
From Churchill and Roosevelt to Eden and Eisenhower, from Macmillan and JFK to Wilson and Johnson, from Thatcher and Reagan, to Blair and Bush, and from Cameron and Obama… to Starmer and Trump, perhaps?
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
4:08
‘History’ that binds the UK and US
A brief history of relationships between PMs and presidents
Throughout UK-US history, there have been many examples of a good relationship and close bond between a Labour prime minister and a Republican president. And vice versa.
Also, it has not always been rosy between prime ministers and presidents of the two sister parties. There have been big fallings out: over Suez, Vietnam and the Caribbean island of Grenada.
Leading up to this Chequers summit, the omens have not been good.
Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player
3:47
Trump meets Starmer: What can we expect?
Second, the president arrived in the UK to a barrage of criticism from London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, who accused him of doing more than anyone else to encourage the intolerant far right across the globe.
Image: Churchill and FDR at the White House in 1941. Pic: AP
Back in the mid-20th century, the godfather of the “special relationship” was wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill, though it was 1946 before he first coined the phrase in a speech in the US, in which he also spoke of the “iron curtain”.
It was in 1941 that Churchill held one of the most significant meetings with a US president, Franklin D Roosevelt, at a Washington conference to plot the defeat of Germany after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour.
Churchill arrived in Washington in December after a rough 10-day voyage on a Royal Navy battleship and stayed three weeks, spending Christmas in the White House and on Boxing Day becoming the first UK PM to address Congress.
The close bond between Churchill and Roosevelt was described as a friendship that saved the world. It was even claimed one reason the pair got on famously was that they were both renowned cigar smokers.
Churchill and Truman
Image: Churchill and Truman catch a train from Washington in 1946. Pic: AP
After the war ended, Churchill’s “special relationship” speech, describing the alliance between the UK and US, was delivered at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri in March 1946.
The speech was introduced by President Harry Truman, a Democrat, with whom Churchill had attended the Potsdam Conference in 1945 to negotiate the terms of ending the war.
These two were also close friends and would write handwritten letters to each other and address one another as Harry and Winston. Mr Truman was also the only US president to visit Churchill at Chartwell, his family home.
Eden and Eisenhower
Image: Eden and Eisenhower shake hands at the conclusion of their three-day conference in 1956. Pic: AP
But the transatlantic cosiness came to an abrupt end in the 1950s, when Churchill’s Conservative successor Anthony Eden fell out badly with the Republican president Dwight Eisenhower over the Suez Crisis.
Mr Eden did visit Mr Eisenhower in Washington in January 1956, and the official record of the meeting describes the discussion as focussing on “policy differences and Cold War problems”.
Macmillan and JFK
Image: Harold Macmillan and John F Kennedy at Andrews Air Force Base. Pic: AP
But in the early 1960s, a Conservative prime minister and a Democrat president with seemingly nothing in common, the stuffy and diffident Harold Macmillan, and the charismatic John F Kennedy, repaired the damage.
They were credited with rescuing the special relationship after the rupture of the Suez Crisis, at a time of high tensions around the world: the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, and the threat of nuclear weapons.
The two leaders exchanged handwritten notes, as well as Christmas and birthday cards. The Macmillans visited the Kennedys twice at the White House, in 1961 and 1962 – the second described in the US as a “momentous” meeting on the Cuban crisis.
The relationship was abruptly cut short in 1963 by “Supermac’s” demise prompted by the Profumo scandal, and JFK’s assassination in Dallas. But after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy was said to have had a father-daughter relationship with Macmillan, who was said to have been enchanted with her.
Wilson and LBJ
Image: Johnson meeting with Wilson. Pic: Glasshouse Images/Shutterstock
After JFK, the so-called “special relationship” cooled once again – and under a Labour prime minister and Democrat president – when Harold Wilson rejected pressure from Lyndon B Johnson to send British troops to Vietnam.
Mr Wilson became prime minister in 1964, just two months after LBJ sent US troops. His first overseas trip was to the White House, in December 1964, and the PM returned to tell his cabinet: “Lyndon Johnson is begging me even to send a bagpipe band to Vietnam.”
Thatcher and Reagan
Image: Thatcher at Reagan’s 83rd birthday celebrations. Pic: Reuters
And even though Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were ideological soulmates, Thatcher was furious when she wasn’t consulted before the Americans invaded Grenada in 1983 to topple a Marxist regime.
Even worse, according to Mrs Thatcher allies, a year earlier, Reagan had stayed neutral during the Falklands war. Reagan said he couldn’t understand why two US allies were arguing over “that little ice-cold bunch of land down there”.
Image: Thatcher and Reagan became firm friends. Pic: Reuters
But their relationship didn’t just survive, it flourished, including at one memorable visit to the presidential retreat at Camp David in 1984, where President Reagan famously drove Mrs T around in a golf buggy.
They would also memorably dance together at White House balls.
Blair and Bush
Image: Blair hosts Bush in Durham in 2003. Pic: PA
Camp David was also where in 2001 the Republican president George W Bush and Labour’s Sir Tony Blair embarked on the defining mission of his premiership: the Iraq War. It was to prove to be an historic encounter.
The war was the turning point of Sir Tony’s decade in Number 10. He was branded a liar over claims about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction”, he was vilified by the Labour left, and it was the beginning of the end for him.
And to add to the suspicion among Sir Tony’s critics that he was Mr Bush’s poodle, in 2006 at a G8 summit in St Petersburg – that wouldn’t happen now – a rogue microphone picked up the president calling, “Yo, Blair! How are you doing?”
Cameron and Obama
Image: Cameron and Obama serve food at a barbecue in the garden of 10 Downing Street. Pic: Reuters
Some years later, the Tory prime minister sometimes called the “heir to Blair”, David Cameron, bonded over burgers with the Democrat president Barack Obama, serving a BBQ lunch to military families in the Downing Street garden. They also played golf at the exclusive Grove resort in 2016.
They seemed unlikely allies: Obama, the first African-American president, and Cameron, the 19th old Etonian prime minister. It was claimed they had a “transatlantic bromance” in office. “Yes, he sometimes calls me bro,” Lord Cameron admitted.
But not everything went well.
The Tory PM persuaded Mr Obama to help the Remain campaign in the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he claimed the UK would be “at the back of the queue” on trade deals with the US, if it left the EU. It backfired, of course.
Now it’s Sir Keir Starmer’s turn to tread a delicate and potentially hazardous political tightrope as he entertains the latest – and most unconventional – US president.
The greatest dangers for Sir Keir will be a news conference in the afternoon, in the gardens, if the weather permits.
Good luck, as they say, with that.
Before then, there’s the potential for what the Americans call a “pool spray”, one of those impromptu, rambling and unpredictable Q&As we’ve seen so many times in the Oval Office.
For Sir Keir, what could possibly go wrong?
Chequers ’25 could be memorable and notable, like so many previous meetings between a PM and a president. But not necessarily for the right reasons for this UK prime minister.