The UK government’s move to award £22bn in subsidies to carbon capture projects followed a sharp increase in lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, it can be revealed.

Oil and gas giants such as Equinor, BP, and ExxonMobil attended 24 of 44 external ministerial meetings to discuss carbon capture and storage (CCS) in 2023, according to official transparency records.

That represented a surge in activity relative to 2020-22, when ministers held about half as many meetings to discuss the technology, and oil and gas companies would attend seven to 10 of these discussions each year.

During a call in December with three Equinor executives, one of the company’s team told Jeremy Allen, then director of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), that Equinor “appreciate[d] the … collaborative approach to policy development”.

In a meeting in March last year, an ExxonMobil executive from the company’s “low carbon solutions” division “spoke of the outstanding need for oil and gas, at the same time as needing to lower emissions”, according to meeting notes obtained by environmental journalism site DeSmog through freedom of information requests.

The growing engagement by oil and gas companies has sharpened concerns among climate advocates that industry is skewing the UK’s carbon capture strategy to preserve demand for fossil gas – a significant source of planet-heating carbon dioxide (CO₂) and methane emissions.

“Fossil fuel companies often have the engineering knowhow to build these projects, so the government naturally has to meet with them,” said Laurie Laybourn, an environmental policy researcher and associate fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research thinktank. “But that might create a risk whereby these companies unduly influence policy and rollout in a way that benefits them.”

Other sectors engaging frequently with ministers on CCS policy include heavy manufacturing companies, CCS technology firms, lobby groups and investment funds.

Researchers, climate advocacy groups and local councils were less well represented, the transparency records showed. No individual organisation from these sectors has attended more than three meetings with ministers on carbon capture since the start of 2020.

Meanwhile, lobby group the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (CCSA) – which represents dozens of fossil fuel companies – attended 20 meetings, and Equinor 16. BP, ExxonMobil, Scottish power company SSE, and Drax, a biomass power plant that is one of the UK’s biggest emitters, also attended nine meetings each during the same period.

The new Labour government announced plans last week to extend £22bn in subsidies for carbon capture over 25 years, saying the strategy can help meet the country’s climate targets and support broader revitalisation of British industry.

The policy builds on the previous Conservative government’s plans to establish four CCS “clusters”, where carbon capture would be used to trap some of the CO₂ emitted by fossil-fuel burning factories and power plants. Pipelines would then carry the captured gas underground to be stored in depleted oil and gas reservoirs under the North and Irish Seas.

The government’s plans include proposals by Equinor and BP – two of the companies that have met ministers most frequently since January 2020 – to build new “low-carbon” gas-fired power stations fitted with carbon capture units, which are slated to be among the first to receive state support.

A group of scientists and campaigners said last month that such projects would allow the companies to continue extracting and burning natural gas based on the promises of unproved and expensive carbon capture technology – at the taxpayer’s expense.

“Putting the UK on the wrong pathway could be catastrophic,” said the letter, addressed to the new energy secretary, Ed Miliband.

Carbon Tracker, a financial thinktank, said in a March report that building new gas-fired power plants “could lock consumers into a high-cost and fossil-based future” and urged the UK to focus on deploying carbon capture in hard-to-decarbonise sectors such as cement.

“These ‘low-carbon’ gas projects are not really low carbon if you look at the whole supply chain,” said the report’s author, Lorenzo Sani. “They also continue this paradigm that we have today of linking our economies with fossil fuels, whose markets are volatile and often controlled by external actors to the UK.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and International Energy Agency envisage significant deployments of carbon capture for reaching net zero emissions by mid-century.

However, many environmental groups are sceptical. Researchers point to the frequent failure of projects to meet carbon capture targets, cost-overruns, the need for multi-billion dollar subsidies, and the tendency of the oil and gas industry to use the technology to justify investments in new fossil fuel projects — rather than focus on cleaning up existing dirty industries.

Nevertheless, oil and gas companies have continued to press the case to ministers that gas-fired power plants fitted with carbon capture can be a climate solution.

The surge in lobbying coincided with the previous Conservative administration’s pledge in March 2023 of £20bn in subsidies for carbon capture projects, which have struggled to prove economical without state support.

Three months after the pledge was announced, lobby group the CCSA told ministers its members were concerned about delays and there was a “struggle to keep investors upbeat”, according to meeting notes.

The CCSA has attended 20 government carbon capture meetings, more than any other organisation since January 2020, including two meetings between January and March 2024, the latest period for which records are available.

When asked to comment on concerns that their CCS projects may “lock in” fossil fuel dependency, BP and Equinor gave an almost identical statement, saying that CCS was essential for the UK’s transition to net zero and would create jobs.

DESNZ said CCS would play a “vital role” in its plans for a clean energy system by 2030. The department also pointed to independent government adviser the Climate Change Committee’s description of carbon capture as a “necessity, not an option”.

The CCSA did not respond to requests for comment.

Two meetings with ExxonMobil designated for the discussion of “carbon solutions” were used by both the company and the then senior DESNZ minister Graham Stuart to reaffirm the need for continued oil and gas production in the UK, meeting notes show.

Stuart told attenders at a meeting on 15 June “that the UK government has championed the need for new oil and gas licences”. An ExxonMobil executive said: “This was important in attracting new investment.”

Later in the meeting, minutes show Stuart “reiterated that the government supports the continued development of oil and gas resources on the UK continental shelf”.

Four months later, the then Conservative government announced it was granting hundreds of new oil and gas licences in the North Sea.

“CCS is technically complex and difficult for anyone but industry experts to fully understand,” said Lindsey Gulden, a former ExxonMobil climate and data scientist. “That means it can be easily spun to give cover to the oil industry as they attempt to navigate the growing public concern over climate change.”

ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.

This work was supported by a grant from Journalismfund Europe.