Continuing to resist – the fight against CCS at Peterhead and beyond 

This year, we’ve continued to put roadblocks in SSE’s path to build a new gas-burning power station with carbon capture and storage in Peterhead. We’ve continued to delay this disastrous project for nearly four years and despite the challenges thrown at the campaign, we’re looking back on 2025 with pride and looking towards 2026 with confidence. 

Getting a truer picture of its climate harm 

After research last year revealed that the new gas plant could generate five times more climate-wrecking emissions than previously admitted SSE were shamed into producing a new climate assessment for their dodgy CCS power station proposal.  

The new Environmental Impact Assessment revealed that the total lifetime climate pollution caused by the project would increase from 6.3 million tonnes of climate-changing pollution to almost three times as much at 17.1 million tonnes of carbon.  

A significant proportion of this increase was due to SSE now including the huge emissions from extracting the gas and transporting it to be burned at the Peterhead site. Previously, the company was only counting the pollution from burning the gas in the power station.Including these “upstream” emissions gives a much more honest picture of the harm caused and the demand created for fossil fuels by a project like this, and reinforces why it must be stopped. 

Following years of dedicated public awareness-raising, taking action & persistent scrutiny from people all over the county no one is buying the companies’ claims. In the most recent round of official government consultations on SSE’s revised assessment more than 30 organisations and 1,600 members of the public lodged objections to the plan. 

Flailing Acorn carbon capture project 

In June, after years of the Scottish Government falling for industry greenwashing and calling on the UK Government for more funding, the Acorn project——was promised £200 million in public money to prop up its polluting plans. Make no mistake, this project aims to turn the North Sea into Scotland’s carbon dumping ground. 

As much as this was a setback, it is crucial to remember that the project is far from a done deal. It still lacks full financial backing and political approval, would take years to build, might never work and remains for now a literal pipe dream! 

The fight is nowhere near over, and the amazing North Sea Knitters demonstrated their determination through their “Pipeline Pilgrimage” cycling 170 miles from Grangemouth to St Fergus along the proposed route of the pipeline for captured carbon , speaking with communities and raising awareness of the climate, health, and nature impacts the project would create. They particularly highlighted the explosion of carbon pipeline in Mississippi in 2020 which injured people and paralysed vehicles due to carbon dioxide concentrations in the surroundings.  

Spoiling SSE’s big meeting 

In July, we were back outside SSE’s annual general meeting (AGM) to point out their hypocrisy of touting themselves as a green company, while making plans to build more fossil fuel power generation in Peterhead. The protest was organised by our fantastic new Peterhead campaign forum, a group of FoES members who’ve come together to shape the direction of the campaign and fight to stop the new power station. The action outside SSE’s AGM in Perth was attended by over 30 campaigners from across the movement and it was a huge success.  

More to do – Scotland’s Climate Change Plan  

Despite continued opposition, the Scottish Government have disappointedly doubled down on its inclusion of CCS in their policies. In November, it released their latest draft Climate Change Plan, which was shockingly light on the necessary action we need to address our climate commitments, support oil workers, or those struggling to pay energy bills and cut off from vital bus services.  

Instead, the plan is relying heavily on the fairytale of CCS. The plan is relying on these supposed ‘negative emission technologies’ to reduce climate emissions by the equivalent of one third of Scotland’s entire climate emissions today.  

Ministers have bet their lot on a technology that has no working plant in Scotland, no application to build one in the planning system, and just recently Storegga pulled out of the Acorn project. What’s more, the plan explicitly dates that all of the costs from these sorts of technologies are expected to fall on the public purse. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so dangerous.  

Coming up in 2026 

In the new year, we’ll be scrutinising just how the Scottish Government have created such a unrealistic climate plan that relies heavily on CCS. Make no mistake – the fossil fuel industry lobbyists have much to answer for in how this technology, which should have no place in the energy transition, has become part of both governments’ approach to climate action. Members and supporters should watch this space for how we’ll be once again exposing this in the new year. 

Year on year, we have built a strong and vocal movement against CCS in Scotland. The fact that the Peterhead project has been delayed for so long, and that key backers are pulling out of Acorn, is testament to the work we have done in opposing this dangerous fantasy of a technology.  

As we move into an election year, it’s crucial that we make sure all politicians know that to be taken seriously on climate means outrightly opposed CCS and rejecting Peterhead. Anything else is a betrayal, of workers and communities who need the security of genuinely renewable industries – to bring costs down, to bring jobs to workers in Scotland, and to usher in a better world for everyone.